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The alternative, now that network bandwidth isn't in the 56Kbps range and sometimes on and sometimes off, is doable. If you look at the "end" game, imagine tha
by ChuckMcM 8y ago
The alternative, now that network bandwidth isn't in the 56Kbps range and sometimes on and sometimes off, is doable.
If you look at the "end" game, imagine that everyone has a machine at their house that they can access locally in their web browser. It has easy tools for posting updates and pictures. When you create a "profile" on it, you can choose to upload that profile to a well known repository of profiles. There is a widget to search the repository for people you might know, and if you "friend" them then your local machine gets a link to their RSS equivalent feed. Friend graphs become distributed, content is always local, and the only cost is to maintain the machine holding the profile repository.
IPV6 addressing and more than 500Kbps of upload bandwidth makes this possible. The current long pole in the tent are ISPs who specifically disallow (and interfere with!) long live server processes in their consumer internet accounts. I've written the FCC and my representatives suggesting that this is a place where some good rulemaking would enable Facebook alternatives that protected civil liberties.
- rootusrootus 8y agoThat machine will need to be an appliance, something like a Google Home or Amazon Echo style device, and your local router should transparently proxy www.facebook.com to it. I'm only sorta kidding. HN is really good at creating solutions that seem totally reasonable to other HN readers but would fall on their face in the wider market of Uncle Bob, Aunt Lois, and Grandma Pearl. You know, the real customer base.
- martythemaniak 8y agoThe problem with Uncle Pearl and Grandma Bob is that you're trying to deliver advanced features AND ease of use. That does require large centralized apps such as facebook. If you ditch either of those requirements, you can probably deliver a solid product.
- ChuckMcM 8y agoSo my history includes a period of time at NetApp, which at the time was doing a pretty good job of creating appliances out of otherwise Intel motherboards with a lot of I/O slots. Appliances with a way to customize them appropriately to the customer by either trained service personnel or technically astute relatives (so documentation has to be available).
- martythemaniak 8y agoI had a very similar idea, except the machine you're referring to here is your phone. Once you restrict yourself to text and low-res pictures, your phone can be your server. A single app would let you edit your profile and post items to a feed. This includes a web server. You can also use it to view friends' profiles and chronological updates from their feeds. All data lives on your phone, fetching updates happens by one phone connecting to another phone. Downsides are that it probably needs some kind of centralized discoverability/listing. Bandwidth would be a problem for folks on crappy data plans, but maybe not so much - you're only serving text and low-res pictures to several dozen people. You can also do stuff like waiting to respond to requests when the phone goes on wifi.
- ChuckMcM 8y agoI would love to see phone homed Apps like this make an appearance on the market. One downside is that your data is in your pocket which means it is lost when you lose your phone. That might be avoided with a thread to back up the data to a home server of some sort.
- TACIXAT 8y agoThis sounds a lot like the scuttlebutt protocol [1] if you provided a discovery service for it. 1. https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/ https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/
- z3t4 8y agoIt already exist, called wifi-router. Which are mostly overpriced Linux servers on a flash drive.