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I'm pretty familiar with FOAF, LinkedData, RDF and all of the rest of the Semantic Web standards. But saying that all of these can replace a system like faceboo

I'm pretty familiar with FOAF, LinkedData, RDF and all of the rest of the Semantic Web standards. But saying that all of these can replace a system like facebook is a bit unintelligent. Facebook brings much more to the table that users need which semantic web has never been able to accomplish like near-instant response times, UX that even my grandma can use and 99% availability... just to name a few. Asking ever day users to create a site (buy a DNS and all that) and create a FOAF file and host it is kind of ridiculous. Facebook is a centralized monopoly I agree, but a bunch of standards isn't going to replace the stuff that Facebook built. I believe the problem of centralization can be solved by looking at the problem differently: what if we continue using these giants for hosting our data (with all the amazing benefits that that brings) but we urge them to provide us with ways to control the way they show us this data. We need better ways to explore our "connection graph", not just a static feed of people we know and things they post. For instance I'd like to be able to change the algorithm that generates my main feed. I want to grab the "political liberal" feed from github (as an open source example) and load it onto facebook; then grab the "climate change biased" feed and load that and test how that works. I want to change the variables of the algorithm, test it for a few days see how that works and change it to something else if I see it's only reporting fake news. This to me seems the problems we need to face this decade when it comes to social networks; building p2p networks from scratch, or using other decentralized standards is cool but isn't inherently solving the problem imho. There's nothing inherently wrong with the social media giants if they prove to us they can show us different views of the graph without getting in the way.

tasogare 7y ago
> Asking ever day users to create a site (buy a DNS and all that) and create a FOAF file and host it is kind of ridiculous. Plus it doesn’t do anything by itself. Someone still need to write software that will parse all those files, follow links, and present the information in a sensible manner. Somehow the SemWeb guys have this magical thoughts that once data are online in RDF the web will be revolutionized. Expected it doesn’t because writing software is the hard part, not converting data from a format to another. Then there is triple stores. The other day I was in front of a Sparql endpoint, with no documentation so I couldn’t get any data from it. And if I got any I would still had to do heavy processing to make use of it. SemWeb is just string programming with IRI to be fancy. Just let it die.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
zozbot234 7y ago
> Asking ever day users to create a site (buy a DNS and all that) and create a FOAF file and host it is kind of ridiculous. It could work like email, where your ISP provides you with a FOAF (or more generally Social Linked Data) store as part of your Internet access package. Or you could buy federated hosting from your preferred 'cloud' supplier.
- nexuist 7y ago
  Does it really make sense to trust ISPs with that data? How is it better if Comcast can spy on me instead of Facebook?
- freeAgent 7y ago
  Does anyone remember Geocities? It was almost a rite of passage in learning The Internet to set up one's very own Geocities webpage.
  - dgellow 7y ago
    > It was almost a rite of passage ... in the US.
    - wink 7y ago
      parts of Europe as well.
Karrot_Kream 7y ago
> I believe the problem of centralization can be solved by looking at the problem differently: what if we continue using these giants for hosting our data (with all the amazing benefits that that brings) but we urge them to provide us with ways to control the way they show us this data. We need better ways to explore our "connection graph", not just a static feed of people we know and things they post. That's exactly what the Solid [1] (or as a sibling mentioned, SoLID - Social Linked Data) project is about. Solid proposes decoupling the presentation layer and the data layer, having data providers specialize in helping FOAF or other RDF data be stored and easily queried, while the view layer would contain logic that queries your FOAF/other-triple data and gives you the experience you are looking for in an app. 1: https://solid.inrupt.com/ https://solid.inrupt.com/
- zcw100 7y ago
  I was waiting for someone to mention Solid. Solid takes all the bad ideas from the Semantic Web and goes all in on stupid. They've been pushing WebID for years which is flawed at its very core. It ties a TLS certificate to a web resource, your WebID profile, but isn't signed, anyone with access to the server could steal your identity. When you mention that to them their usual response either, "No problem, a raspberry Pi is $35. I run one in my basement and you should too!" or "No problem. You can change providers if they ever steal your identity because with Solid you have choices!". So you bite the bullet, order a Pi, register a domain, basically become your own sys admin - and you thought getting your mothers wifi working was bad - running your own little data center out of your basement. Now you need to actually use this WebID thing...it just happens to rely on the HTML keygen tag. Haven't heard of that one before? That's because it's a rarely used, on again, off again, supported tag. That's not really going to work so they decide to do what they always do, piggyback on something that actually works. Enter, WebID-OICD that piggybacks on OAuth2/OpenID connect except profiles still aren't signed, oops. None of your information is encrypted so your pod hosting provider has complete access to everything. For some reason they're cool with that. There's no way pod providers would collude to aggregate your data. You're going to have so much choice and the tech is so awesome that you're just going to seamlessly migrate from provider to provider that it's never going to happen. Don't worry that doing anything with it is going to be hopelessly slow because everything is federated.
EGreg 7y ago
I doubt that the problem of centralization can be solved by keeping the centralization (feudalism) and hoping our feudal lords will become nicer. Just like the Impossible Burger, people will only switch once they have a good enough alternative. Instead of copypasting a wall of text let me link you to what I previously write about the problem and what I believe to be the actual solution: https://qbix.com/blog/2019/03/08/how-qbix-platform-can-change-the-world/ https://qbix.com/blog/2019/03/08/how-qbix-platform-can-chang...
chipotle_coyote 7y ago
> Asking ever day users to create a site (buy a DNS and all that) and create a FOAF file and host it is kind of ridiculous. This is literally what the article on Two-Bit History says in its conclusion as to why FOAF failed; I'm not quite sure why you're describing it as "a bit unintelligent" when it's, you know, saying exactly what you are? > what if we continue using these giants for hosting our data (with all the amazing benefits that that brings) but we urge them to provide us with ways to control the way they show us this data. That's a great idea in theory, but in practice, how do you propose to do that? Facebook and Twitter don't want to let you change the algorithm that generates your main feed; they don't want to give you ways to control how they show you that data. The API Twitter provides to third-party clients is heavily restricted (and has been very deliberately made worse over the years), and the API that Facebook offers for those purposes is even worse. Neither system wants to let you control your social graph. The kind of access you're describing is access that is difficult to monetize -- unless they charge for that access directly, in which case it's just as dead in the water in practice as "just embed this FOAF XML block on your personal web page" is. > There's nothing inherently wrong with the social media giants if they prove to us they can show us different views of the graph without getting in the way. I think from a purely technical standpoint, you're probably right, but we don't live in a world where "purely technical standpoint" wins the day. This is not their business model. This will never be their business model. Mastodon and other decentralized networks have their problems, but given the choice between "improve Mastodon" and "convince Facebook to open access," only one of them sounds feasible to me.
CaptArmchair 7y ago
> Asking ever day users to create a site (buy a DNS and all that) and create a FOAF file and host it is kind of ridiculous. You're describing a 2nd order effect created by behavioral dynamics all underpinned by the same core concept: ownership. Your experience of usability, discovery, security, performance,... is entirely determined by the affordances of the tools you're using. And your level of control over those affordances is pretty much determined by the extent of your ownership over those tools. If you use social media, you don't own the tools & infrastructure that host your data, including your social graph. You're basically a tenant on the lands of a liege lord and you pay by disclosing every aspect of your behavior to your lord. Relying on cloud services is marginally better. Freedom comes at a cost. Leasing a VPS or shared hosting space, you're not bound to the strict terms & conditions of social media platforms. However, you're still a tenant to your hosting provider. Some people still don't like that. For one, the provider could go dark (go out of business, etc.) and you lose control over your data. You could take it up a notch and lease a physical server in a data center. But that would still make you a tenant. Owning the physical hardware would get you even more freedom and control over your machine. But you don't control the data center. That's when you start to enter the realm of purists among the self-hosted community: self-hosting a physical server at home and leasing an IP address from your ISP. Of course, every day users aren't interested in creating a website. But the vast majority of humanity didn't have a significant footprint online some 15 years ago either. Billions suddenly started using the Internet/Web in earnest because social media made it extremely easy to connect and publish to wide audience at virtually no financial expense. However, there's no free lunch. Never was. Someone pays the bills to keep the lights on. And those who pay, well, they hold the governance of those tools. And this includes how everything ranging from advertising to the algorithm that selects the types of information it's going to push in your eyeballs. You have the right to pursue freedom, privacy, security, performance,... but you're not entitled to them. They come at a price. Either by doing the effort and actually doing everything yourself; or by paying someone to do it for you. The promise of semantic web technology is that it preserves interoperability between data sources without having the condition that you need to host your data on a platform you do not own. However, semantic web technology did not promise to solve the overall problem of ownership over hosting and publishing tools. This actually being a compounded problem which consists of the problem of intellectual property (open source), knowledge (learning how to code takes time and effort), scarcity of resources (hardware, electricity, physical security,... all costs moneys). By and large, over the past 30 years a ton has improved. Unless you're a self-hosting purist, anyone can host their own website for 50$-100$ a year using popular VPS providers; reducing the problem largely to a matter of lack of technological knowledge on the part of the average user. Then again, the vast majority of humanity uses social media not because there's an actual need to do so; but simply because it's there. Consider that asserting that people using social media equates "progress", may actually also just be hindsight bias. But that's another discussion.

tasogare 7y ago

> Asking ever day users to create a site (buy a DNS and all that) and create a FOAF file and host it is kind of ridiculous. Plus it doesn’t do anything by itself. Someone still need to write software that will parse all those files, follow links, and present the information in a sensible manner. Somehow the SemWeb guys have this magical thoughts that once data are online in RDF the web will be revolutionized. Expected it doesn’t because writing software is the hard part, not converting data from a format to another. Then there is triple stores. The other day I was in front of a Sparql endpoint, with no documentation so I couldn’t get any data from it. And if I got any I would still had to do heavy processing to make use of it. SemWeb is just string programming with IRI to be fancy. Just let it die.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

zozbot234 7y ago

> Asking ever day users to create a site (buy a DNS and all that) and create a FOAF file and host it is kind of ridiculous. It could work like email, where your ISP provides you with a FOAF (or more generally Social Linked Data) store as part of your Internet access package. Or you could buy federated hosting from your preferred 'cloud' supplier.

nexuist 7y ago
Does it really make sense to trust ISPs with that data? How is it better if Comcast can spy on me instead of Facebook?
freeAgent 7y ago
Does anyone remember Geocities? It was almost a rite of passage in learning The Internet to set up one's very own Geocities webpage.
- dgellow 7y ago
  > It was almost a rite of passage ... in the US.
  - wink 7y ago
    parts of Europe as well.

Karrot_Kream 7y ago

> I believe the problem of centralization can be solved by looking at the problem differently: what if we continue using these giants for hosting our data (with all the amazing benefits that that brings) but we urge them to provide us with ways to control the way they show us this data. We need better ways to explore our "connection graph", not just a static feed of people we know and things they post. That's exactly what the Solid [1] (or as a sibling mentioned, SoLID - Social Linked Data) project is about. Solid proposes decoupling the presentation layer and the data layer, having data providers specialize in helping FOAF or other RDF data be stored and easily queried, while the view layer would contain logic that queries your FOAF/other-triple data and gives you the experience you are looking for in an app. 1: https://solid.inrupt.com/ https://solid.inrupt.com/

zcw100 7y ago
I was waiting for someone to mention Solid. Solid takes all the bad ideas from the Semantic Web and goes all in on stupid. They've been pushing WebID for years which is flawed at its very core. It ties a TLS certificate to a web resource, your WebID profile, but isn't signed, anyone with access to the server could steal your identity. When you mention that to them their usual response either, "No problem, a raspberry Pi is $35. I run one in my basement and you should too!" or "No problem. You can change providers if they ever steal your identity because with Solid you have choices!". So you bite the bullet, order a Pi, register a domain, basically become your own sys admin - and you thought getting your mothers wifi working was bad - running your own little data center out of your basement. Now you need to actually use this WebID thing...it just happens to rely on the HTML keygen tag. Haven't heard of that one before? That's because it's a rarely used, on again, off again, supported tag. That's not really going to work so they decide to do what they always do, piggyback on something that actually works. Enter, WebID-OICD that piggybacks on OAuth2/OpenID connect except profiles still aren't signed, oops. None of your information is encrypted so your pod hosting provider has complete access to everything. For some reason they're cool with that. There's no way pod providers would collude to aggregate your data. You're going to have so much choice and the tech is so awesome that you're just going to seamlessly migrate from provider to provider that it's never going to happen. Don't worry that doing anything with it is going to be hopelessly slow because everything is federated.

EGreg 7y ago

I doubt that the problem of centralization can be solved by keeping the centralization (feudalism) and hoping our feudal lords will become nicer. Just like the Impossible Burger, people will only switch once they have a good enough alternative. Instead of copypasting a wall of text let me link you to what I previously write about the problem and what I believe to be the actual solution: https://qbix.com/blog/2019/03/08/how-qbix-platform-can-change-the-world/ https://qbix.com/blog/2019/03/08/how-qbix-platform-can-chang...

chipotle_coyote 7y ago

> Asking ever day users to create a site (buy a DNS and all that) and create a FOAF file and host it is kind of ridiculous. This is literally what the article on Two-Bit History says in its conclusion as to why FOAF failed; I'm not quite sure why you're describing it as "a bit unintelligent" when it's, you know, saying exactly what you are? > what if we continue using these giants for hosting our data (with all the amazing benefits that that brings) but we urge them to provide us with ways to control the way they show us this data. That's a great idea in theory, but in practice, how do you propose to do that? Facebook and Twitter don't want to let you change the algorithm that generates your main feed; they don't want to give you ways to control how they show you that data. The API Twitter provides to third-party clients is heavily restricted (and has been very deliberately made worse over the years), and the API that Facebook offers for those purposes is even worse. Neither system wants to let you control your social graph. The kind of access you're describing is access that is difficult to monetize -- unless they charge for that access directly, in which case it's just as dead in the water in practice as "just embed this FOAF XML block on your personal web page" is. > There's nothing inherently wrong with the social media giants if they prove to us they can show us different views of the graph without getting in the way. I think from a purely technical standpoint, you're probably right, but we don't live in a world where "purely technical standpoint" wins the day. This is not their business model. This will never be their business model. Mastodon and other decentralized networks have their problems, but given the choice between "improve Mastodon" and "convince Facebook to open access," only one of them sounds feasible to me.

CaptArmchair 7y ago

> Asking ever day users to create a site (buy a DNS and all that) and create a FOAF file and host it is kind of ridiculous. You're describing a 2nd order effect created by behavioral dynamics all underpinned by the same core concept: ownership. Your experience of usability, discovery, security, performance,... is entirely determined by the affordances of the tools you're using. And your level of control over those affordances is pretty much determined by the extent of your ownership over those tools. If you use social media, you don't own the tools & infrastructure that host your data, including your social graph. You're basically a tenant on the lands of a liege lord and you pay by disclosing every aspect of your behavior to your lord. Relying on cloud services is marginally better. Freedom comes at a cost. Leasing a VPS or shared hosting space, you're not bound to the strict terms & conditions of social media platforms. However, you're still a tenant to your hosting provider. Some people still don't like that. For one, the provider could go dark (go out of business, etc.) and you lose control over your data. You could take it up a notch and lease a physical server in a data center. But that would still make you a tenant. Owning the physical hardware would get you even more freedom and control over your machine. But you don't control the data center. That's when you start to enter the realm of purists among the self-hosted community: self-hosting a physical server at home and leasing an IP address from your ISP. Of course, every day users aren't interested in creating a website. But the vast majority of humanity didn't have a significant footprint online some 15 years ago either. Billions suddenly started using the Internet/Web in earnest because social media made it extremely easy to connect and publish to wide audience at virtually no financial expense. However, there's no free lunch. Never was. Someone pays the bills to keep the lights on. And those who pay, well, they hold the governance of those tools. And this includes how everything ranging from advertising to the algorithm that selects the types of information it's going to push in your eyeballs. You have the right to pursue freedom, privacy, security, performance,... but you're not entitled to them. They come at a price. Either by doing the effort and actually doing everything yourself; or by paying someone to do it for you. The promise of semantic web technology is that it preserves interoperability between data sources without having the condition that you need to host your data on a platform you do not own. However, semantic web technology did not promise to solve the overall problem of ownership over hosting and publishing tools. This actually being a compounded problem which consists of the problem of intellectual property (open source), knowledge (learning how to code takes time and effort), scarcity of resources (hardware, electricity, physical security,... all costs moneys). By and large, over the past 30 years a ton has improved. Unless you're a self-hosting purist, anyone can host their own website for 50$-100$ a year using popular VPS providers; reducing the problem largely to a matter of lack of technological knowledge on the part of the average user. Then again, the vast majority of humanity uses social media not because there's an actual need to do so; but simply because it's there. Consider that asserting that people using social media equates "progress", may actually also just be hindsight bias. But that's another discussion.