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> Is this what FSF has become? What do you mean? This is what FSF has always been like. They're shockingly zealots in defending absolute gpl-style freedom ove

by hasenj 16y ago

> Is this what FSF has become? What do you mean? This is what FSF has always been like. They're shockingly zealots in defending absolute gpl-style freedom over all your digital goods. In all honesty I don't think a decentralized and "Free" facebook would work. The centralization is a feature that most people want; it's part of why it "just work" without you having to become a system (or a network) administrator. Imagine: Mom: How come I'm not receiving updates from your aunt anymore? You: Well, you have to wait for $INSERT_TECHNICAL_TERM to propagate or something. Mom: Do I have to enter her hash-thing again? or worse: Mom: I'm getting a lot of spam You: You have to install morton anti-spam social-edition Mom: It won't install. You: sigh here I come. It's like email, but much worse because it has way more features, and more ways for things to go wrong. Plus, I think Mark Zuckerberg actually donated money to the Diaspora project.

joe_the_user 16y ago
The thing about the FSF is that they have been tremendously influential. Facebook runs on quite a number of technologies released under ... the FSF's GPL. By setting an extremely high bar, they've managed to get a lot of people to move towards that bar. Not as close as they'd like, I'm sure but much closer than they'd otherwise have moved. The FSF has made a priceless contribution whether or not we're going to see a world that conforms to their vision.
jedsmith 16y ago
Yes, he did. http://mashable.com/2010/05/28/zuckerberg-diaspora/ http://mashable.com/2010/05/28/zuckerberg-diaspora/
michaelchisari 16y ago
As a developer of a decentralized social networking project (Appleseed), I think you have a misconception of how these projects work. Your mother will never have to manage any of that stuff. She'll just log in to socialsite.com and interact with your aunt, who's on othersite.org. If there's an issue with communication between them, the administrators of respective sites will deal with them. Your mom won't notice it anymore than when she notices Facebook's internal servers are experiencing a glitch. And honestly, people don't "want" centralization of social networking any more than they "wanted" the centralization that AOL featured over the decentralization of the web.
- ubernostrum 16y ago
  Your mother will never have to manage any of that stuff. She'll just log in to socialsite.com and interact with your aunt, who's on othersite.org. As I said when Diaspora first started making headlines, this is incorrect. Both your mother and your aunt would be signing in to (name of decentralized social service).google.com, just like everybody else except for a handful of geeks who take pride in running their own nodes. Because, really, the only way decentralized social networking will work is if everybody ends up centralized again on one node, run for free (most likely) or very cheap (not as likely) by some big company they trust. AKA, Google, who'd certainly love to have access to all the types of data Facebook currently has.
  - michaelchisari 16y ago
    Both your mother and your aunt would be signing in to (name of decentralized social service).google.com, just like everybody else except for a handful of geeks who take pride in running their own nodes. Or Microsoft's node, or Yahoo's node, or Amazon's node or anyone else with the infrastructure to run a huge scale social site. But all that aside, you don't consider this a better situation than now, where all data is walled off and silo'd and the biggest player is an effective monopoly with much, much less interest in privacy and data security than Google? And geeks have no option whatsoever to operate a social network independently? If not, what do you propose, other than acquiescence?
    - nkassis 16y ago
      So what your saying is everyone would have access to all the data? Not exactly better in my view.
      - michaelchisari 16y ago
        So what your saying is everyone would have access to all the data? Where did I say that?
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
trotsky 16y ago
Seems like a pretty misguided point of view. Something tells me a sizable amount of the facebook crowd is comfortable downloading torrents, I'm pretty sure that counts as distributed/decentralized. As far as free software, is your mom unable to use any website that uses apache, ngix, php or ruby? Almost everyone has a broadband router that is almost entirely open source. My Mom and Dad both use an open source browser, what do yours use? Is your point that only companies worth $50bn can build usable web apps, or that anyone that doesn't want to sell your data can't do UX?
- adw 16y ago
  The Facebook crowd is 500m people. The number who even know what BitTorrent is compared to that is a rounding error.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - trotsky 16y ago
    http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-smashes-12000000-bittorrent-users-080424/ http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-smashes-12000000-bitt... That's from 2008 announcing Pirate Bay had hit 12 million concurrent peers on their tracker. That's not total users, that's total online. Take that number and multiply it by 5 to 10 to estimate total users, double it to account for the rest of the global trackers (low?) and increase it by some percentage to account for 3 years of growth and you're in the hundreds of millions of users range, possibly as high as 300M or more. I'm not a crazy bittorrent fanboy, in fact I'm quite the opposite, but I think it's clear that the number of users of a decentralized system can far exceed any "rounding errors" of facebook's numbers.
    - georgemcbay 16y ago
      By having 12 million concurrent peers on their tracker, aren't they pretty much de facto centralized even if the protocol is theoretically decentralized? If The Pirate Bay disappears tomorrow do all of those users just switch over to another tracker? Very likely not. They'd just wait around to hear about the next Napster->Kazaa->LimeWire->Pirate Bay from their tech savvy friends, remaining mostly oblivious to the technology being used under the hood.
dimitar 16y ago
Maybe it could be decentralized - a system of interconnected networks connected by common protocols.
statictype 16y ago
Strawman. There's no technical reason why a decentralized system can't work. The main road blocks would be finding a compelling reason for people to switch away to one in the first place. Email is decentralized. It seems to have worked pretty darn well.
- SoftwareMaven 16y ago
  Email is just as much a strawman. Compare how simple email is to all of the features Facebook provides (and don't forget your ability to click on your cows in Farmville). You say there are no technical reasons why it can't work. That is very akin to the "You can do anything, it's just a simple matter of coding." The reality is that some problems become intractable due to their complexity. Distributed social network may not be intractable (Diaspora will probably figure that out), but it's a hell of a lot harder than email.
  - statictype 16y ago
    Just to clarify, when I said 'technical reason' I meant from the perspective of a user being able to setup/configure their social network settings. Not from the perspective of the internal implementation of the server components
- hasenj 16y ago
  Email works because everyone uses a web-based email, namely one of three: gmail, hotmail, yahoo. The end result is the same: a few BigCompanies have access to alot of your data. I think most people here on HN use gmail (but I could be wrong).
  - statictype 16y ago
    Most people do. Not all. The point being that you could choose to roll your own if you wanted to. I bet many people on HN have their own domain and their own mail server. Hell, for a few dollars a month you can get a web hosting company to set it up for you. For those who care about those things, they can do that and still be able to communicate with people who use gmail or yahoo mail.
macgirvin 16y ago
In fact it's very much like email. You're just sending messages back and forth between people. Really, that's all it is. Most people won't leave Facebook - even if you delivered an electric shock every time they hit the FB website. It's where their friends are. But there is room in the world for a decentralised and distributed social net. I wrote one (called Friendika). There are people who have a need for a social service of their own. There are online communities which still exist and where people send messages to each other and interact. It is not whether or not they will replace Facebook. It is simply that Facebook doesn't cater to every social need of every organisation on the planet. Other services need to fill the gaps. One day some will realise that they are spending more time on network 'x' than on Facebook. In fact many of us are doing this today. At that point Facebook becomes irrelevant and loses its grip. Most people don't care who runs the servers. They also don't care if it is centralised or not. All they care about is communicating with people who matter. I would like to point out that girls who rejected you in high school that are now on your Facebook friend list - don't matter. If your mom is on Facebook - chances are that it is reluctantly and she'd much rather you just called her on the phone.

by hasenj 16y ago

joe_the_user 16y ago

The thing about the FSF is that they have been tremendously influential. Facebook runs on quite a number of technologies released under ... the FSF's GPL. By setting an extremely high bar, they've managed to get a lot of people to move towards that bar. Not as close as they'd like, I'm sure but much closer than they'd otherwise have moved. The FSF has made a priceless contribution whether or not we're going to see a world that conforms to their vision.

jedsmith 16y ago

Yes, he did. http://mashable.com/2010/05/28/zuckerberg-diaspora/ http://mashable.com/2010/05/28/zuckerberg-diaspora/

michaelchisari 16y ago

As a developer of a decentralized social networking project (Appleseed), I think you have a misconception of how these projects work. Your mother will never have to manage any of that stuff. She'll just log in to socialsite.com and interact with your aunt, who's on othersite.org. If there's an issue with communication between them, the administrators of respective sites will deal with them. Your mom won't notice it anymore than when she notices Facebook's internal servers are experiencing a glitch. And honestly, people don't "want" centralization of social networking any more than they "wanted" the centralization that AOL featured over the decentralization of the web.

ubernostrum 16y ago
Your mother will never have to manage any of that stuff. She'll just log in to socialsite.com and interact with your aunt, who's on othersite.org. As I said when Diaspora first started making headlines, this is incorrect. Both your mother and your aunt would be signing in to (name of decentralized social service).google.com, just like everybody else except for a handful of geeks who take pride in running their own nodes. Because, really, the only way decentralized social networking will work is if everybody ends up centralized again on one node, run for free (most likely) or very cheap (not as likely) by some big company they trust. AKA, Google, who'd certainly love to have access to all the types of data Facebook currently has.
- michaelchisari 16y ago
  Both your mother and your aunt would be signing in to (name of decentralized social service).google.com, just like everybody else except for a handful of geeks who take pride in running their own nodes. Or Microsoft's node, or Yahoo's node, or Amazon's node or anyone else with the infrastructure to run a huge scale social site. But all that aside, you don't consider this a better situation than now, where all data is walled off and silo'd and the biggest player is an effective monopoly with much, much less interest in privacy and data security than Google? And geeks have no option whatsoever to operate a social network independently? If not, what do you propose, other than acquiescence?
  - nkassis 16y ago
    So what your saying is everyone would have access to all the data? Not exactly better in my view.
    - michaelchisari 16y ago
      So what your saying is everyone would have access to all the data? Where did I say that?
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]

trotsky 16y ago

Seems like a pretty misguided point of view. Something tells me a sizable amount of the facebook crowd is comfortable downloading torrents, I'm pretty sure that counts as distributed/decentralized. As far as free software, is your mom unable to use any website that uses apache, ngix, php or ruby? Almost everyone has a broadband router that is almost entirely open source. My Mom and Dad both use an open source browser, what do yours use? Is your point that only companies worth $50bn can build usable web apps, or that anyone that doesn't want to sell your data can't do UX?

adw 16y ago
The Facebook crowd is 500m people. The number who even know what BitTorrent is compared to that is a rounding error.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- trotsky 16y ago
  http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-smashes-12000000-bittorrent-users-080424/ http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-smashes-12000000-bitt... That's from 2008 announcing Pirate Bay had hit 12 million concurrent peers on their tracker. That's not total users, that's total online. Take that number and multiply it by 5 to 10 to estimate total users, double it to account for the rest of the global trackers (low?) and increase it by some percentage to account for 3 years of growth and you're in the hundreds of millions of users range, possibly as high as 300M or more. I'm not a crazy bittorrent fanboy, in fact I'm quite the opposite, but I think it's clear that the number of users of a decentralized system can far exceed any "rounding errors" of facebook's numbers.
  - georgemcbay 16y ago
    By having 12 million concurrent peers on their tracker, aren't they pretty much de facto centralized even if the protocol is theoretically decentralized? If The Pirate Bay disappears tomorrow do all of those users just switch over to another tracker? Very likely not. They'd just wait around to hear about the next Napster->Kazaa->LimeWire->Pirate Bay from their tech savvy friends, remaining mostly oblivious to the technology being used under the hood.

dimitar 16y ago

Maybe it could be decentralized - a system of interconnected networks connected by common protocols.

statictype 16y ago

Strawman. There's no technical reason why a decentralized system can't work. The main road blocks would be finding a compelling reason for people to switch away to one in the first place. Email is decentralized. It seems to have worked pretty darn well.

SoftwareMaven 16y ago
Email is just as much a strawman. Compare how simple email is to all of the features Facebook provides (and don't forget your ability to click on your cows in Farmville). You say there are no technical reasons why it can't work. That is very akin to the "You can do anything, it's just a simple matter of coding." The reality is that some problems become intractable due to their complexity. Distributed social network may not be intractable (Diaspora will probably figure that out), but it's a hell of a lot harder than email.
- statictype 16y ago
  Just to clarify, when I said 'technical reason' I meant from the perspective of a user being able to setup/configure their social network settings. Not from the perspective of the internal implementation of the server components
hasenj 16y ago
Email works because everyone uses a web-based email, namely one of three: gmail, hotmail, yahoo. The end result is the same: a few BigCompanies have access to alot of your data. I think most people here on HN use gmail (but I could be wrong).
- statictype 16y ago
  Most people do. Not all. The point being that you could choose to roll your own if you wanted to. I bet many people on HN have their own domain and their own mail server. Hell, for a few dollars a month you can get a web hosting company to set it up for you. For those who care about those things, they can do that and still be able to communicate with people who use gmail or yahoo mail.

macgirvin 16y ago

In fact it's very much like email. You're just sending messages back and forth between people. Really, that's all it is. Most people won't leave Facebook - even if you delivered an electric shock every time they hit the FB website. It's where their friends are. But there is room in the world for a decentralised and distributed social net. I wrote one (called Friendika). There are people who have a need for a social service of their own. There are online communities which still exist and where people send messages to each other and interact. It is not whether or not they will replace Facebook. It is simply that Facebook doesn't cater to every social need of every organisation on the planet. Other services need to fill the gaps. One day some will realise that they are spending more time on network 'x' than on Facebook. In fact many of us are doing this today. At that point Facebook becomes irrelevant and loses its grip. Most people don't care who runs the servers. They also don't care if it is centralised or not. All they care about is communicating with people who matter. I would like to point out that girls who rejected you in high school that are now on your Facebook friend list - don't matter. If your mom is on Facebook - chances are that it is reluctantly and she'd much rather you just called her on the phone.