6 ms·

Why decentralized social networking never makes it

66 points by rchaudhary 8y ago

cjslep 8y ago
> Trending cannot be implemented at all … I don’t mean to pick on Mastodon specifically, but it’s the latest whose growth is disappointing. Actually, trending was implemented by Gargron, but user outcry against it basically caused him to scrap that feature. Edit: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/7702 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/7702 Here's a major user feature for why people switch to Mastodon and Pleroma: better tools for users and admins to manage spam and stop harassment at an individual and community level. Edit2: It's pretty funny that "Trending" and "Mastodon" got mentioned here, as I forgot that in the outcry this was one of the pieces of feedback: > [...] maybe you should not be defining the roadmap based on Hacker News thinkpieces.
- swiley 8y ago
  That issue thread is pretty unpleasant to read. Good on Gargron for that incredible amount of patience.
geggam 8y ago
Because people who run the social networks run into the capitalists who explain to them how much money they can make. Centralizing that network is how you profit. Humans are greedy.
- orev 8y ago
  Or, humans require basic resources to survive, like food and shelter, and our society currently requires you to have money in order to obtain those things.
  - goliatone 8y ago
    I don’t think is fair to characterize Facebook as something that originated from the founder’s urge to cover basic needs such as food or shelter- their own or anyone else’s for that matter. In fact startup mode pretty much demands you forget as much as possible about those basic needs by putting the startup at the center of everything you do.
    - orev 8y ago
      The tone of the comment was that people who write software are greedy and just want to cash out. The point is that people can’t eat or pay rent with principles or “likes”, so at some point they need to try to make money to survive, and that does not make one “greedy”.
jhabdas 8y ago
What do you call the Web?
- __s 8y ago
  Some people call it Facebook
  - okket 8y ago
    That's too narrow. There is also this search box in the middle, where you can type and get to Facebook.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
starbugs 8y ago
Is the Cambridge Analytica scandal a valid problem?
- ridgewell 8y ago
  Unfortunately, a good majority of Facebook Users still barely know what that is, or have never heard of it.
  - starbugs 8y ago
    Guess then we'll have to wait for the next (bigger) "breach" of "trust" :)
    - gremlinsinc 8y ago
      Younger generations have grown up on fb and youtube...everything they do--they share...sadly. They don't care about 'trust' of their data, they don't seem to care about privacy at all, because they've never known privacy, it's a foreign concept to them...
      - starbugs 8y ago
        I anticipate this will be a self-correcting problem eventually. If it's not for large-scale political effects that evolve as a consequence of reckless evasion of privacy, then it might be events on a small scale. Maybe your current girlfriend happens to be the ex of some other guy that uses the information you provided to stalk you. This kind of event happens on a different time scale than the instant gratification scheme that made certain social media platforms so successful. Nonetheless their negative impact is orders of magnitude higher than all of those small positive impacts combined so that they eventually outweigh them. It's a matter of time.
        gremlinsinc 8y ago
        I'd hope it gets corrected... But it could be a slippery slope with more and more privacy protections and freedoms taken away... I mean you give up freedom it becomes easier to give up more especially when groups are involved... Hopefully those who with in tech and code the crap can enforce some ethics though.
golangnews 8y ago
Decentralised social networks, like decentralised currencies, are solving the wrong problems.
hliyan 8y ago
"In summary: we have plenty (too many, in fact) protocols suitable for decentralized social networking, so just pick something" I pick email: https://hackernoon.com/email-re-skinned-as-a-social-network-c33b175f3a9e https://hackernoon.com/email-re-skinned-as-a-social-network-...
- 0x264 8y ago
  +1
- joe_the_user 8y ago
  This seems like a great idea (one I've picked-over in my mind). Has anyone done more than the outline in this page?
  - matlin 8y ago
    I've actually been working on this exact idea combined with a few other features. The main finding so far is that adding a simple contact list to your email that blocks all messages from senders not in your contacts has some far reaching potential. The biggest one is how it can drastically reduce spam: not worrying about whether some website is going to abuse or share your email is a big advantage. The other big win, is that you don't have to be as secretive of your email address if you don't have to worry about being plagued with spam for life. I plan on making this a public service in the next few weeks.
    - joe_the_user 8y ago
      Well, white lists are great until someone useful wants to find you out of the blue or until companies require email verification for something then wind-up spamming you. The ideal would be a "feed" as well as an ordinary list of messages. Also, it would be nice to have this sort of thing run either on a server or a client.
  - hliyan 8y ago
    I really do want to make this happen, but I'm currently extremely busy (a poor excuse since that seems to be my default state of being). Hopefully I can set aside some time and assemble a few people end of this year to get something started...
malvosenior 8y ago
Because social networking isn't a new idea and people don't care about it enough to switch to a new network anymore. Once upon a time there was Friendster, Orkut, MySpace, Facebook... Digitizing your connections and friends was a new and exciting concept. Now everyone has been connected and we've seen it's not always a great thing. I don't think it's interesting enough of an experience to replicate rebuilding a network elsewhere at this point.
grosjona 8y ago
The real reason why centralized networks currently cannot be replaced by decentralized alternatives is that being centralized allows a company to do secret, evil-but-lucrative deals under the table without having to reach any sort of social consensus. Centralized solutions are not impeded by moral factors; they can optimize for user acquisition and profitability instead - They can corrupt the government such that new regulations work to their advantage. They can promise key external decision makers lucrative future contracts or positions in exchange for favors (e.g. onboarding lucrative customers)...
- kami8845 8y ago
  Ahahahahaha yes, yes, the only reason they succeed instead of us is because they're evil & corrupt. Keep telling yourself that.
yusee 8y ago
New social networks are a huge opportunity. Decentralization is just an architectural consideration, not significant to users. A novel user experience is needed to disrupt the market leaders. Clones of existing interfaces with "decentralized" ideology are not appealing products to most humans.
- sshine 8y ago
  Except for the fact that a decentralized service can split. This will affect users.
EGreg 8y ago
Because it’s very hard to build something with all the features that people expect in 2018. It takes a serious amount of time and money. Our company (qbix.com) made $1MM selling apps for iOS and Mac, and reinvested most our profits over 7 years into building just such an open source decentralized social network. Here is a video about it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI You can find the entire general purpose platform here: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform And even though we had done all this, we have not yet started to popularize it. We wanted to get the kinks out first. Examples of stuff you should have at a minimum: user accounts, onboarding, pub-sub, transactional emails and sms, notifications on all platforms including web push, real time updates via web sockets, privacy and access control to content, multi user collaboration, one click invitations, easy installer and updater scripts, caching resources locally, indexing and relationships across domains, authentication across domains (github.com/Qbix/auth) with seamless experience across domains and more. And then you should probably also integrate with local address books, support uploading and sync from gmail and other sources, support payments on all platforms eg applepay and androidpay, and so on. I have met teams working on other projects including MaidSAFE and Solid by Tim Berners-Lee. The missing piece is all the user-friendly apps and components. It’s a bit like when the Mac and Windows came out, personal computers finally got much more massive adoption. Or like when the Web became good enough to compete with AOL. It takes time for open source to catch up to proprietary software, but once it does, it is a force to be reckoned with. PS: If anyone wants to join our project to either contribute (design, development in PHP or JS, or grow the community) get in touch by emailing greg+hn @at@ qbix.com
kristiandupont 8y ago
This is only slightly on topic, but I think that "problems solved" is an extraordinarily good way to look at B2B companies, but a suboptimal one for most B2C companies. With exceptions; consumers have problems too. Many Europeans are currently dealing with wasps in great numbers because of the heat wave. Solving that is a potential business. But even though you can formulate what, say, Snapchat does as the solution to a problem I just don't think that's a very useful way to look at it. It has more to do with entertainment value and trends. Those are things that are much harder to quantify.
- dgerges 8y ago
  Need for entertainment and trends can be user problems. I would argue that Snapchat and the likes solve a user problem : boredom and need ton express without leaving trails...
zimbatm 8y ago
I already have a decentralized social network and it works great, it's called brain. If my brain is not capable of remembering people then are the connections really meaningful? I don't mind using email, forums, IRC and various chat apps. And even better meeting people in the real world. It's great that everything is not unified, it would become too boring. I am sure some other technologies will come up but most of those solutions are trying too hard to be the next thing that replaces all the previous technologies.
- mmirate 8y ago
  That works well if your brain is specialized correctly to actually keep track of all this. During my undergraduate, I personally was semi-regularly accosted by strangers who knew me and, only after at least half a minute's conversation, I finally recognized as not-strangers. I don't handle people well (but computers are far easier to debug), so the more of it I can offload externally so that I can focus my brain on what really matters, the better. Comparative advantage.
Fnoord 8y ago
The main reason they don't make it is simple: network effect [1]. However, "The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers" Ie. the more oppressive and tyrannical Facebook (and Twitter, and the US government) becomes, the better the alternatives become. There's a reason the shit Snowden uncovered was meant to be kept secret. It wakes people up. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
jancsika 8y ago
The problem is that a technical means-- decentralization-- quickly becomes an ethical stance. Then that ethical stance outweighs every other concern in irrational ways, including growing the network.
- repolfx 8y ago
  Bingo. In particular decentralization is far too often taken to mean "profit is bad" and "companies have no role to play".
- untangle 8y ago
  > ...a technical means -- decentralization -- quickly becomes an ethical stance... As in blockchain?
  - jancsika 8y ago
    Blockchain isn't an ethical stance as much as a mad scramble to cash in on something. What I'm talking about is something like what happened with Retroshare. They created a friend-to-friend social graph that could facilitate file-sharing, chat, etc. Then the users quickly figured out that bootstrapping an F2F network is extremely difficult unless you are in the same physical proximity as your peers (e.g., a college dorm). Otherwise there is no easy way to do key exchange. So the idea was introduced that you could have these bootstrap servers (not sure what they called them) so that all the new users who couldn't download anything could use them to do a key exchange with at least one other random peer, thus entering the network that way. But such a user is no longer building an F2F network. Instead it is some kind of friend roulette network where you trust random nodes only because the software would be unusable otherwise. Worse-- at the time Retroshare data wasn't onion-routed so the user was shuttling data unencrypted data among untrustworthy nodes, and encouraged by other users to shuttle share data for friends-of-friends because that would presumably improve your connectivity. At that point everyone except little LAN F2F islands would have only been slightly worse off with a Facebook-style app where Retroshare devs surveilled the network and spent all their time denying access to whatever they considered bad actors. It goes without saying that FLOSS devs would never build a Facebook-style app. But there is at least one other piece decentralized app I know that did essentially the same bootstrap roulette as Retroshare. The only way that can happen is if users and devs feel like they are doing something righteous by using such a piece of software, rather than just leveraging a tool to do a job.
izacus 8y ago
Hmm, wouldn't forums, community sites and places like HackerNews count as "decentralized social networking"?
- gremlinsinc 8y ago
  So a company doesn't own hackernews? If the hn servers just go down, everything stays up because it's all distributed across a network?
  - mattlondon 8y ago
    decentralised != distributed. People could argue that Facebook effectively has a monopoly on social media so that is a "centralised" source since you have to go to Facebook to access it. Yet pockets exist (e.g. HN) outside of Facebook, ergo decentralised. I do agree though, it is not distributed which has a different meaning. Checkout dat project, ipfs et al for that.
    - gremlinsinc 8y ago
      Hn is still centralized... It's a garden of its own... Just as Twitter and Reddit are all centralized. All forums are also centralized. All centralized means is one organization controls all the data/rules for that service. If they shut down or go out of business you lose all the data unless you backed out up somehow. Moderators on forums, Reddit hn, etc all have final say on what stays and goes... Though that could overlap a little in decentralized networks where the node owner has some control.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
CM30 8y ago
Well, I'd say marketing issues have an effect here too. Lots of 'alternatives' don't really understand that average Joe doesn't specifically care about decentralisation (or privacy/censorship resistance/whatever else they're marketing the product on). They don't hate said things, they just don't care about them as much as finding interesting people to follow/groups to be a part of, joining in an active community, finding information about things they're having trouble with, being entertained, etc. But most decentralised systems seem to be marketed on the assumption the decentralisation side (and the philosophical aims of the service) are the only important thing, and hence don't really appeal to those outside of the tech crowd and those with a desparate need for avoiding censorship. Secondly, the UI is often worse than the centralised or commercial alternatives, with very few systems (Mastodon arguably being of the exceptions) looking or feeling as modern or responsive. Finally, plain old network effects have an effect too. The more people who use your service, the more popular it'll become, since more people they know will be encouraged to join in. But to achieve that, you usually need to put time and money into marketing your product and attracting as many early users as you can. That's hard work, and it's not fun for a developer. What is fun for a developer is to play around with programming languages and data structures and protocols and frameworks and all the new shiny stuff they saw on Hacker News. So all the effort goes towards making a technically fancy system, whereas none of it goes towards actually getting people to use said system, or getting the word out in general. Get away from the code editor and get into community building. (Though to be fair, that last one is also a problem with most new social networking sites in general, decentralised or not. Every modern Reddit or Twitter alternative feels like a programmer's fun pet project rather than a service they're marketing to people) Either way, I think that covers it. The lack of certain features like trending content doesn't matter as much as how these systems don't market themselves correctly and put little work into the things people actually care about.
- swiley 8y ago
  >They don't hate said things, they just don't care about them as much as finding interesting people to follow/groups to be a part of, joining in an active community, finding information about things they're having trouble with, being entertained, etc. >But most decentralized systems seem to be marketed on the assumption the decentralisation side (and the philosophical aims of the service) are the only important thing, and hence don't really appeal to those outside of the tech crowd and those with a desparate need for avoiding censorship. I think it used to be that way but (at least from what I've been hearing) a lot of non-tech "normal" people are starting to realize the problem with censorship. They might not see that it's a symptom of centralization yet but they definitely are starting to care.
marknadal 8y ago
What are they kidding? - Decentralized YouTube (https://d.tube/ https://d.tube/) is almost in the Top 10K most popular sites in the USA (https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/d.tube https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/d.tube). - Decentralized Reddit (https://notabug.io/ https://notabug.io/ , https://blubit.space/ https://blubit.space/ , etc.) has ~1K daily uniques. Both sites are built using our https://github.com/amark/gun https://github.com/amark/gun ! Soon they'll even integrate same private/public keys so you can reuse your same account across many different dApps. This will only strengthen the network effect, and make decentralized apps take off even more. Also note, Mastodon is federated, you still "belong" to a server.
- nl 8y ago
  has ~1K daily uniques I'm not sure that makes the point I assume you are trying to make.
shion 8y ago
When ipv6 is popular, it is the time of centralization and death.
- mmirate 8y ago
  In what way does IPv6 condone centralization more than IPv4? (My prior assumption was that IPv6's lack of strict need for NATs means that in an all-IPv6 world it is easier for anyone to run a server, versus today. But I don't specialize in networking, so I'm all ears for other takes on this.)
silur 8y ago
"Why would you eat an orange when you could drink a coffee instead?" Yes there are heavy mathematics behind the structure of both types of network, and it's true that without centralization the network itself can't reach a certain limit. But this is a double-edged sword, this is only true to the whole system's perspective and it's completely different on the node (user) level graph-theoritically. Also, the article forces certain needs on the users. There are lots of us who DON'T want to magically find anyone or be found magically with a keyword, nor interested in "trends" - this is heavily misleading for we still don't have proper metrics for it and won't have one for a while because the problem implies building fault-tolerant reputation networks (that are decentralized by the way)
quotemstr 8y ago
Honestly? Because decentralized social networks are usually implemented by people who have an inaccurate mental model of what the population at large wants in a social network. There's a lot of noise online about how this feature or that feature is addictive tracking-based anti-civilization satancode or something, but outside a loud and hardcore fringe, users actually want this stuff. Good feed ranking depends, for example, on building accurate models of user preferences. If you listen to the loud fringe, you'll end up with a product only the fringe wants to use.
- danShumway 8y ago
  > you'll end up with a product only the fringe wants to use. Is that a problem? I mean, my first thought when I hear this is, "yeah, broad adoption is totally necessary." But, then I think about it more. - Is it a problem for indie developers to build games that appeal to niche audiences? - Is it a problem for software developers to build CLI tools or advanced software that solves very specific problems at the expense of user friendliness? - Is it a problem for communities to be built around specific problems and for them to adopt very specific, focused codes of conduct or moderation? Maybe it's OK to have a bunch of small, separate decentralized networks instead of one big decentralized one? With something like Facebook, sure, the point is to have everyone in one place. But one of the big points of systems like Mastodon is that small communities are better than big ones. Small communities are easier to moderate, more flexible to adapt to novel situations, and faster to pivot when things go wrong. Having niche adoption in that scenario could be kind of a feature, in the same way that having niche adoption for a game probably means you're getting something more focused and custom tailored to the people who want it. It might be that not every social network needs to appeal to the overwhelming public at large. It mind end up being completely acceptable to have a social network that's very specific to one or two communities. In that scenario, the death of Facebook might not be, "here's a replacement, everyone get off." It might be death from a thousand cuts; "here's a dozen replacements, there's probably at least one you like more."
  - joe_the_user 8y ago
    Unless Facebook is replaced by one other thing, network effect will keep people on Facebook as well as one whatever else might suit a culture they're in. Edit: that said, there's no reason that an obscure subculture adopting a different social networking technology couldn't lead to that tech becoming universal. Facebook rose through a certain high-prestige subculture adopting it but with the Internet tending to creating different association patterns, high-prestige/"early adopter" may not, in fact, be the leaders of adoption in the future.
pokemongoaway 8y ago
It depends how tight censorship gets. Much tighter and it may be more hassle free to run decentralized. But currently, it is still easier just to start another centralized platform. It isn't so much easier, however, that with a few hundred million, a proper niche, and a quality decentralized app couldn't make it as #1 in it's category.
ummonk 8y ago
The vertical he gave seems to do just fine with centralization. Asana and Trello are very popular for the work-tracking use-case.
nanomonkey 8y ago
The problem that scuttlebutt solves for me is that it works offline first. I can post and read past posts from my friends, or friends of friends, quite easily while on a plane, or at a cafe that doesn't supply internet. I can also block users that I don't like, or create entirely new networks for a specific problem such as the author suggested.
ohiovr 8y ago
"To use a specific example, here’s a problem worth solving with decentralized social networking-style technology that occurred to me last night. It is a real problem with real time savings and other important benefits attached. (Note: you could actually get people to pay for social networking! What an idea!) Imagine you are the “resposible adult” who takes care of an elderly relative, or a child, with a complex, chronic disease. You are probably middle-aged, female, family-minded, and have your hands full. Other than juggling your family and your job, you also need to find the right specialists for young Bob, organize rides to and from treatment, get second options, research conditions, get prescriptions filled, supervise that Bob actually takes them on time, keep all the other relatives updated, draft them for particular task (“can you take him to the physical therapist on Tuesday”), listen in to some on-line self-help groups, being a Mom of course etc. etc." I was just in this situation taking care of my mom after her stroke and I don't think this kind of service is very compelling. Most of mom's friends don't know much about computers in general. Some don't even own a computer. taking some time to make phone calls, text messages, email, and letters is well worth it. It absolutely has to be done personally (well I think so at least).
alexandernst 8y ago
Because the vast majority of the target market of social networks doesn’t care (or even know) if it’s decentralized. Next question.

66 points by rchaudhary 8y ago

> Trending cannot be implemented at all … I don’t mean to pick on Mastodon specifically, but it’s the latest whose growth is disappointing. Actually, trending was implemented by Gargron, but user outcry against it basically caused him to scrap that feature. Edit: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/7702 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/7702 Here's a major user feature for why people switch to Mastodon and Pleroma: better tools for users and admins to manage spam and stop harassment at an individual and community level. Edit2: It's pretty funny that "Trending" and "Mastodon" got mentioned here, as I forgot that in the outcry this was one of the pieces of feedback: > [...] maybe you should not be defining the roadmap based on Hacker News thinkpieces.

swiley 8y ago
That issue thread is pretty unpleasant to read. Good on Gargron for that incredible amount of patience.

geggam 8y ago

Because people who run the social networks run into the capitalists who explain to them how much money they can make. Centralizing that network is how you profit. Humans are greedy.

orev 8y ago
Or, humans require basic resources to survive, like food and shelter, and our society currently requires you to have money in order to obtain those things.
- goliatone 8y ago
  I don’t think is fair to characterize Facebook as something that originated from the founder’s urge to cover basic needs such as food or shelter- their own or anyone else’s for that matter. In fact startup mode pretty much demands you forget as much as possible about those basic needs by putting the startup at the center of everything you do.
  - orev 8y ago
    The tone of the comment was that people who write software are greedy and just want to cash out. The point is that people can’t eat or pay rent with principles or “likes”, so at some point they need to try to make money to survive, and that does not make one “greedy”.

jhabdas 8y ago

What do you call the Web?

__s 8y ago
Some people call it Facebook
- okket 8y ago
  That's too narrow. There is also this search box in the middle, where you can type and get to Facebook.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]

starbugs 8y ago

Is the Cambridge Analytica scandal a valid problem?

ridgewell 8y ago
Unfortunately, a good majority of Facebook Users still barely know what that is, or have never heard of it.
- starbugs 8y ago
  Guess then we'll have to wait for the next (bigger) "breach" of "trust" :)
  - gremlinsinc 8y ago
    Younger generations have grown up on fb and youtube...everything they do--they share...sadly. They don't care about 'trust' of their data, they don't seem to care about privacy at all, because they've never known privacy, it's a foreign concept to them...
    - starbugs 8y ago
      I anticipate this will be a self-correcting problem eventually. If it's not for large-scale political effects that evolve as a consequence of reckless evasion of privacy, then it might be events on a small scale. Maybe your current girlfriend happens to be the ex of some other guy that uses the information you provided to stalk you. This kind of event happens on a different time scale than the instant gratification scheme that made certain social media platforms so successful. Nonetheless their negative impact is orders of magnitude higher than all of those small positive impacts combined so that they eventually outweigh them. It's a matter of time.
      - gremlinsinc 8y ago
        I'd hope it gets corrected... But it could be a slippery slope with more and more privacy protections and freedoms taken away... I mean you give up freedom it becomes easier to give up more especially when groups are involved... Hopefully those who with in tech and code the crap can enforce some ethics though.

golangnews 8y ago

Decentralised social networks, like decentralised currencies, are solving the wrong problems.

hliyan 8y ago

"In summary: we have plenty (too many, in fact) protocols suitable for decentralized social networking, so just pick something" I pick email: https://hackernoon.com/email-re-skinned-as-a-social-network-c33b175f3a9e https://hackernoon.com/email-re-skinned-as-a-social-network-...

0x264 8y ago
+1
joe_the_user 8y ago
This seems like a great idea (one I've picked-over in my mind). Has anyone done more than the outline in this page?
- matlin 8y ago
  I've actually been working on this exact idea combined with a few other features. The main finding so far is that adding a simple contact list to your email that blocks all messages from senders not in your contacts has some far reaching potential. The biggest one is how it can drastically reduce spam: not worrying about whether some website is going to abuse or share your email is a big advantage. The other big win, is that you don't have to be as secretive of your email address if you don't have to worry about being plagued with spam for life. I plan on making this a public service in the next few weeks.
  - joe_the_user 8y ago
    Well, white lists are great until someone useful wants to find you out of the blue or until companies require email verification for something then wind-up spamming you. The ideal would be a "feed" as well as an ordinary list of messages. Also, it would be nice to have this sort of thing run either on a server or a client.
- hliyan 8y ago
  I really do want to make this happen, but I'm currently extremely busy (a poor excuse since that seems to be my default state of being). Hopefully I can set aside some time and assemble a few people end of this year to get something started...

malvosenior 8y ago

Because social networking isn't a new idea and people don't care about it enough to switch to a new network anymore. Once upon a time there was Friendster, Orkut, MySpace, Facebook... Digitizing your connections and friends was a new and exciting concept. Now everyone has been connected and we've seen it's not always a great thing. I don't think it's interesting enough of an experience to replicate rebuilding a network elsewhere at this point.

grosjona 8y ago

The real reason why centralized networks currently cannot be replaced by decentralized alternatives is that being centralized allows a company to do secret, evil-but-lucrative deals under the table without having to reach any sort of social consensus. Centralized solutions are not impeded by moral factors; they can optimize for user acquisition and profitability instead - They can corrupt the government such that new regulations work to their advantage. They can promise key external decision makers lucrative future contracts or positions in exchange for favors (e.g. onboarding lucrative customers)...

kami8845 8y ago
Ahahahahaha yes, yes, the only reason they succeed instead of us is because they're evil & corrupt. Keep telling yourself that.

yusee 8y ago

New social networks are a huge opportunity. Decentralization is just an architectural consideration, not significant to users. A novel user experience is needed to disrupt the market leaders. Clones of existing interfaces with "decentralized" ideology are not appealing products to most humans.

sshine 8y ago
Except for the fact that a decentralized service can split. This will affect users.

EGreg 8y ago

Because it’s very hard to build something with all the features that people expect in 2018. It takes a serious amount of time and money. Our company (qbix.com) made $1MM selling apps for iOS and Mac, and reinvested most our profits over 7 years into building just such an open source decentralized social network. Here is a video about it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI You can find the entire general purpose platform here: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform And even though we had done all this, we have not yet started to popularize it. We wanted to get the kinks out first. Examples of stuff you should have at a minimum: user accounts, onboarding, pub-sub, transactional emails and sms, notifications on all platforms including web push, real time updates via web sockets, privacy and access control to content, multi user collaboration, one click invitations, easy installer and updater scripts, caching resources locally, indexing and relationships across domains, authentication across domains (github.com/Qbix/auth) with seamless experience across domains and more. And then you should probably also integrate with local address books, support uploading and sync from gmail and other sources, support payments on all platforms eg applepay and androidpay, and so on. I have met teams working on other projects including MaidSAFE and Solid by Tim Berners-Lee. The missing piece is all the user-friendly apps and components. It’s a bit like when the Mac and Windows came out, personal computers finally got much more massive adoption. Or like when the Web became good enough to compete with AOL. It takes time for open source to catch up to proprietary software, but once it does, it is a force to be reckoned with. PS: If anyone wants to join our project to either contribute (design, development in PHP or JS, or grow the community) get in touch by emailing greg+hn @at@ qbix.com

kristiandupont 8y ago

This is only slightly on topic, but I think that "problems solved" is an extraordinarily good way to look at B2B companies, but a suboptimal one for most B2C companies. With exceptions; consumers have problems too. Many Europeans are currently dealing with wasps in great numbers because of the heat wave. Solving that is a potential business. But even though you can formulate what, say, Snapchat does as the solution to a problem I just don't think that's a very useful way to look at it. It has more to do with entertainment value and trends. Those are things that are much harder to quantify.

dgerges 8y ago
Need for entertainment and trends can be user problems. I would argue that Snapchat and the likes solve a user problem : boredom and need ton express without leaving trails...

zimbatm 8y ago

I already have a decentralized social network and it works great, it's called brain. If my brain is not capable of remembering people then are the connections really meaningful? I don't mind using email, forums, IRC and various chat apps. And even better meeting people in the real world. It's great that everything is not unified, it would become too boring. I am sure some other technologies will come up but most of those solutions are trying too hard to be the next thing that replaces all the previous technologies.

mmirate 8y ago
That works well if your brain is specialized correctly to actually keep track of all this. During my undergraduate, I personally was semi-regularly accosted by strangers who knew me and, only after at least half a minute's conversation, I finally recognized as not-strangers. I don't handle people well (but computers are far easier to debug), so the more of it I can offload externally so that I can focus my brain on what really matters, the better. Comparative advantage.

Fnoord 8y ago

The main reason they don't make it is simple: network effect [1]. However, "The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers" Ie. the more oppressive and tyrannical Facebook (and Twitter, and the US government) becomes, the better the alternatives become. There's a reason the shit Snowden uncovered was meant to be kept secret. It wakes people up. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

jancsika 8y ago

The problem is that a technical means-- decentralization-- quickly becomes an ethical stance. Then that ethical stance outweighs every other concern in irrational ways, including growing the network.

repolfx 8y ago
Bingo. In particular decentralization is far too often taken to mean "profit is bad" and "companies have no role to play".
untangle 8y ago
> ...a technical means -- decentralization -- quickly becomes an ethical stance... As in blockchain?
- jancsika 8y ago
  Blockchain isn't an ethical stance as much as a mad scramble to cash in on something. What I'm talking about is something like what happened with Retroshare. They created a friend-to-friend social graph that could facilitate file-sharing, chat, etc. Then the users quickly figured out that bootstrapping an F2F network is extremely difficult unless you are in the same physical proximity as your peers (e.g., a college dorm). Otherwise there is no easy way to do key exchange. So the idea was introduced that you could have these bootstrap servers (not sure what they called them) so that all the new users who couldn't download anything could use them to do a key exchange with at least one other random peer, thus entering the network that way. But such a user is no longer building an F2F network. Instead it is some kind of friend roulette network where you trust random nodes only because the software would be unusable otherwise. Worse-- at the time Retroshare data wasn't onion-routed so the user was shuttling data unencrypted data among untrustworthy nodes, and encouraged by other users to shuttle share data for friends-of-friends because that would presumably improve your connectivity. At that point everyone except little LAN F2F islands would have only been slightly worse off with a Facebook-style app where Retroshare devs surveilled the network and spent all their time denying access to whatever they considered bad actors. It goes without saying that FLOSS devs would never build a Facebook-style app. But there is at least one other piece decentralized app I know that did essentially the same bootstrap roulette as Retroshare. The only way that can happen is if users and devs feel like they are doing something righteous by using such a piece of software, rather than just leveraging a tool to do a job.

izacus 8y ago

Hmm, wouldn't forums, community sites and places like HackerNews count as "decentralized social networking"?

gremlinsinc 8y ago
So a company doesn't own hackernews? If the hn servers just go down, everything stays up because it's all distributed across a network?
- mattlondon 8y ago
  decentralised != distributed. People could argue that Facebook effectively has a monopoly on social media so that is a "centralised" source since you have to go to Facebook to access it. Yet pockets exist (e.g. HN) outside of Facebook, ergo decentralised. I do agree though, it is not distributed which has a different meaning. Checkout dat project, ipfs et al for that.
  - gremlinsinc 8y ago
    Hn is still centralized... It's a garden of its own... Just as Twitter and Reddit are all centralized. All forums are also centralized. All centralized means is one organization controls all the data/rules for that service. If they shut down or go out of business you lose all the data unless you backed out up somehow. Moderators on forums, Reddit hn, etc all have final say on what stays and goes... Though that could overlap a little in decentralized networks where the node owner has some control.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

CM30 8y ago

Well, I'd say marketing issues have an effect here too. Lots of 'alternatives' don't really understand that average Joe doesn't specifically care about decentralisation (or privacy/censorship resistance/whatever else they're marketing the product on). They don't hate said things, they just don't care about them as much as finding interesting people to follow/groups to be a part of, joining in an active community, finding information about things they're having trouble with, being entertained, etc. But most decentralised systems seem to be marketed on the assumption the decentralisation side (and the philosophical aims of the service) are the only important thing, and hence don't really appeal to those outside of the tech crowd and those with a desparate need for avoiding censorship. Secondly, the UI is often worse than the centralised or commercial alternatives, with very few systems (Mastodon arguably being of the exceptions) looking or feeling as modern or responsive. Finally, plain old network effects have an effect too. The more people who use your service, the more popular it'll become, since more people they know will be encouraged to join in. But to achieve that, you usually need to put time and money into marketing your product and attracting as many early users as you can. That's hard work, and it's not fun for a developer. What is fun for a developer is to play around with programming languages and data structures and protocols and frameworks and all the new shiny stuff they saw on Hacker News. So all the effort goes towards making a technically fancy system, whereas none of it goes towards actually getting people to use said system, or getting the word out in general. Get away from the code editor and get into community building. (Though to be fair, that last one is also a problem with most new social networking sites in general, decentralised or not. Every modern Reddit or Twitter alternative feels like a programmer's fun pet project rather than a service they're marketing to people) Either way, I think that covers it. The lack of certain features like trending content doesn't matter as much as how these systems don't market themselves correctly and put little work into the things people actually care about.

swiley 8y ago
>They don't hate said things, they just don't care about them as much as finding interesting people to follow/groups to be a part of, joining in an active community, finding information about things they're having trouble with, being entertained, etc. >But most decentralized systems seem to be marketed on the assumption the decentralisation side (and the philosophical aims of the service) are the only important thing, and hence don't really appeal to those outside of the tech crowd and those with a desparate need for avoiding censorship. I think it used to be that way but (at least from what I've been hearing) a lot of non-tech "normal" people are starting to realize the problem with censorship. They might not see that it's a symptom of centralization yet but they definitely are starting to care.

marknadal 8y ago

What are they kidding? - Decentralized YouTube (https://d.tube/ https://d.tube/) is almost in the Top 10K most popular sites in the USA (https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/d.tube https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/d.tube). - Decentralized Reddit (https://notabug.io/ https://notabug.io/ , https://blubit.space/ https://blubit.space/ , etc.) has ~1K daily uniques. Both sites are built using our https://github.com/amark/gun https://github.com/amark/gun ! Soon they'll even integrate same private/public keys so you can reuse your same account across many different dApps. This will only strengthen the network effect, and make decentralized apps take off even more. Also note, Mastodon is federated, you still "belong" to a server.

nl 8y ago
has ~1K daily uniques I'm not sure that makes the point I assume you are trying to make.

shion 8y ago

When ipv6 is popular, it is the time of centralization and death.

mmirate 8y ago
In what way does IPv6 condone centralization more than IPv4? (My prior assumption was that IPv6's lack of strict need for NATs means that in an all-IPv6 world it is easier for anyone to run a server, versus today. But I don't specialize in networking, so I'm all ears for other takes on this.)

silur 8y ago

"Why would you eat an orange when you could drink a coffee instead?" Yes there are heavy mathematics behind the structure of both types of network, and it's true that without centralization the network itself can't reach a certain limit. But this is a double-edged sword, this is only true to the whole system's perspective and it's completely different on the node (user) level graph-theoritically. Also, the article forces certain needs on the users. There are lots of us who DON'T want to magically find anyone or be found magically with a keyword, nor interested in "trends" - this is heavily misleading for we still don't have proper metrics for it and won't have one for a while because the problem implies building fault-tolerant reputation networks (that are decentralized by the way)

quotemstr 8y ago

Honestly? Because decentralized social networks are usually implemented by people who have an inaccurate mental model of what the population at large wants in a social network. There's a lot of noise online about how this feature or that feature is addictive tracking-based anti-civilization satancode or something, but outside a loud and hardcore fringe, users actually want this stuff. Good feed ranking depends, for example, on building accurate models of user preferences. If you listen to the loud fringe, you'll end up with a product only the fringe wants to use.

danShumway 8y ago
> you'll end up with a product only the fringe wants to use. Is that a problem? I mean, my first thought when I hear this is, "yeah, broad adoption is totally necessary." But, then I think about it more. - Is it a problem for indie developers to build games that appeal to niche audiences? - Is it a problem for software developers to build CLI tools or advanced software that solves very specific problems at the expense of user friendliness? - Is it a problem for communities to be built around specific problems and for them to adopt very specific, focused codes of conduct or moderation? Maybe it's OK to have a bunch of small, separate decentralized networks instead of one big decentralized one? With something like Facebook, sure, the point is to have everyone in one place. But one of the big points of systems like Mastodon is that small communities are better than big ones. Small communities are easier to moderate, more flexible to adapt to novel situations, and faster to pivot when things go wrong. Having niche adoption in that scenario could be kind of a feature, in the same way that having niche adoption for a game probably means you're getting something more focused and custom tailored to the people who want it. It might be that not every social network needs to appeal to the overwhelming public at large. It mind end up being completely acceptable to have a social network that's very specific to one or two communities. In that scenario, the death of Facebook might not be, "here's a replacement, everyone get off." It might be death from a thousand cuts; "here's a dozen replacements, there's probably at least one you like more."
- joe_the_user 8y ago
  Unless Facebook is replaced by one other thing, network effect will keep people on Facebook as well as one whatever else might suit a culture they're in. Edit: that said, there's no reason that an obscure subculture adopting a different social networking technology couldn't lead to that tech becoming universal. Facebook rose through a certain high-prestige subculture adopting it but with the Internet tending to creating different association patterns, high-prestige/"early adopter" may not, in fact, be the leaders of adoption in the future.

pokemongoaway 8y ago

It depends how tight censorship gets. Much tighter and it may be more hassle free to run decentralized. But currently, it is still easier just to start another centralized platform. It isn't so much easier, however, that with a few hundred million, a proper niche, and a quality decentralized app couldn't make it as #1 in it's category.

ummonk 8y ago

The vertical he gave seems to do just fine with centralization. Asana and Trello are very popular for the work-tracking use-case.

nanomonkey 8y ago

The problem that scuttlebutt solves for me is that it works offline first. I can post and read past posts from my friends, or friends of friends, quite easily while on a plane, or at a cafe that doesn't supply internet. I can also block users that I don't like, or create entirely new networks for a specific problem such as the author suggested.

ohiovr 8y ago

"To use a specific example, here’s a problem worth solving with decentralized social networking-style technology that occurred to me last night. It is a real problem with real time savings and other important benefits attached. (Note: you could actually get people to pay for social networking! What an idea!) Imagine you are the “resposible adult” who takes care of an elderly relative, or a child, with a complex, chronic disease. You are probably middle-aged, female, family-minded, and have your hands full. Other than juggling your family and your job, you also need to find the right specialists for young Bob, organize rides to and from treatment, get second options, research conditions, get prescriptions filled, supervise that Bob actually takes them on time, keep all the other relatives updated, draft them for particular task (“can you take him to the physical therapist on Tuesday”), listen in to some on-line self-help groups, being a Mom of course etc. etc." I was just in this situation taking care of my mom after her stroke and I don't think this kind of service is very compelling. Most of mom's friends don't know much about computers in general. Some don't even own a computer. taking some time to make phone calls, text messages, email, and letters is well worth it. It absolutely has to be done personally (well I think so at least).

alexandernst 8y ago

Because the vast majority of the target market of social networks doesn’t care (or even know) if it’s decentralized. Next question.