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Wikipedia lists close to 40(!) distributed social networks. [1] None have achieved a meaningful amount of adoption. About a year ago I became interested in why

Wikipedia lists close to 40(!) distributed social networks. [1] None have achieved a meaningful amount of adoption. About a year ago I became interested in why this is the case. I'm an academic computer scientist with a strong interest in the startup/web tech scene (see profile for info). My colleagues and I have been studying not just decentralized social networks, but the more general concept of decentralized architectures for personal data. This includes "personal data store" efforts which are popping up all over the place, with similarly dismal adoption, "infomediaries" which were the rage in the late 90s (before the dot com bust ate them up), etc. Overall, we've looked at around 80 companies, projects, and proposals. If the amount of reinvention in this space is surprising, the almost wanton refusal to learn from others' past mistakes is shocking. These projects seem to do the same things wrong and fail for very similar reasons, chief among them building more technology when it's not really technology that's holding things back. There is the widespread — but often unstated and always unexamined — belief among the participants that moving to a decentralized setting is a magic cure-all for the problems that ail today's status quo, such as privacy and interoperability. Sadly, this belief is simply wrong. I certainly sympathize with the urge to pat these guys on the back for trying, but is it really courage or foolhardiness? If 10,000 amateurs have tried to solve P =? NP and failed, do we encourage the 10,001th guy to give it a shot as well, or do we tell him to learn some math and CS first, and gain an appreciation for why the problem is hard and probably not worth taking on unless you really really know what you're doing? [Our study is not out yet, but feel free to contact me if you're interested in discussing this.] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network

mcantelon 15y ago
>There is the widespread — but often unstated and always unexamined — belief among the participants that moving to a decentralized setting is a magic cure-all for the problems that ail today's status quo, such as privacy and interoperability. It's an improvement over data sitting in a central silo waiting to be mined and monitored. How would you suggest tackling the problem?
- wmf 15y ago
  It's an improvement over data sitting in a central silo waiting to be mined and monitored. I think this is a perfect example of the subtlety of the issues. Let's imagine that Diaspora succeeds and Facebook, MySpace, and Google+ all adopt its federation protocol; in that case it's likely that all of those companies would have access to most of what you post, effectively reducing privacy.
  - misterbee 15y ago
    But they'd only each have the subset of your data that you choose to publish on their respective networks, right?
    - wmf 15y ago
      To give a specific example, if you friend someone on Facebook from Diaspora then Facebook would probably have cached copies of any data you publish that is accessible by that friend, including all your public data. (I guess you would have to agree to Facebook's TOS when you friend that person, even though you don't have a Facebook account.)
neilk 15y ago
I have a bet with random_walker that a distributed social network will gain significant traction by 2014. http://twitter.com/#!/flipzagging/status/16766878672228352 http://twitter.com/#!/flipzagging/status/16766878672228352 Diaspora is a sad story: a team with great intentions but little systems experience, becoming the standard-bearer for distributed social networking. They gained attention from some random factors (frustration with Facebook at a peak, NYtimes story, Kickstarter). I think the odds of there being a single winner-take-all provider of social networking services (SNS), forever and ever, are slight. The idea that kids are going to stick with the SNS their mom uses to play Farmville seems ridiculous to me. So we should see some amount of fragmentation, eventually. It also seems absurd to me that Facebook will remain agile enough to shut out competitors while also supporting 500M+ users. At some point, a situation should arise where competitor SNS services will find it to their advantage to be interoperable. That could end in an oligopoly, but that still counts as a more distributed social network. Larry Page often likes to say "don't bet against the internet". And I am old enough to remember when people thought that Microsoft's Project Blackbird was going to kill the web. I am confident that SNS, like almost all internet services, will be commodified at some point, and probably sooner than we expect. Caveat: this hasn't quite worked out for instant messaging, so I could be wrong.
- socratic 15y ago
  Those bet terms seem really odd. Your bet is that within 3 years, there will be a distributed social network with at least 1M users? Am I reading that correctly? Google Plus, which people aren't even really sure is a success yet, had 10 million users in less than a month. Is there some reason that you chose the number 1M as significant traction? If anything, those terms suggest to me that you're not really convinced it's going to happen.
  - scrame 15y ago
    Google Plus is not distributed, and they gained most of their users rolling over from gmail.
    - socratic 15y ago
ugh 15y ago
I wasn’t really aware that computer science went into research directions like that. It seems either like classic social science (in this case communication studies) territory or like business economics territory. What approach are you taking when looking at budding and failed social networks? Did you do a quantitative study or were you looking for patterns in a more qualitative fashion?
- randomwalker 15y ago
  It's a purely qualitative study. You're right, it's a bit outside the normal ambit of computer science. I'm interested in multidisciplinary questions; we do also have non computer scientists among the authors, for example Prof. Nissenbaum http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/ http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/ Overall, as you suggest, our analysis is a mixture of CS, economics and social science.
- jdp23 15y ago
  Computer science _is_ a social science* -- especially when it comes to success and failure of a social network. You can't separate the software from the social and organizational context it's used in. * more at http://achangeiscoming.net/docs/cssocsci.html http://achangeiscoming.net/docs/cssocsci.html
  - Locke1689 15y ago
    That's going to be a hard sell. I do research in programming languages now and I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that the fundamental nature of my work is a social science. Especially since the initiating paper included a proof of correctness...
    - jdp23 15y ago
      Well, it's not _just_ a social science. There's still plenty of interesting work to do with 1's and 0's and proofs. But even in "hard CS" areas like programming languages, the social since aspects are pretty significant. What influences the success of new languages and evolutions of existing ones? Why haven't some obviously good featuers like pre- and post-conditions and invariants been better integrated by most mainstream languages? How to make functional programming accessible to a lot more people?
protomyth 15y ago
I thought usenet would be a better starting point for how todo it.
- Tichy 15y ago
  And I thought email.
  - protomyth 15y ago
    SMTP is not quite as close to the goal as NNTP.
ianb 15y ago
I feel like it's a form of opportunity cost that creates an imperials debt. Decentralization, and even more so all the motivations that lead developers down the path of decentralization, has nothing to do with making a good social network. It's like all the solar-powered cars... a cute idea, but no one ever (ever) buys a car for fuel efficiency. You buy a car to travel, to carry things. So the solar cars are cute, but they fail at everything a car is supposed to do. You can't possibly improve on something unless you start by implementing the thing.
forgottenpaswrd 15y ago
PS: If you knew what you are doing, you will never start: Donald Knut said that if he knew the work that it would be when he started typography, he would never had done it( this means no TeX, and Latex, and art of CS books). Steve Jobs and Wozniak said that if they knew what they were to do when they created Apple, they would had never started it. About being "hard", I don't think it was harder for this twenty something to create facebook than other SN. He just did it right.
forgottenpaswrd 15y ago
"or do we tell him to learn some math and CS first, and gain an appreciation for why the problem is hard and probably not worth taking on unless you really really know what you're doing?" The problem IS learning more math and CS, because odds are the people that make "yet another social network" already know about math and computer science as they use to be geeks. So you are an academic and you believe they need more academics. What they don't know is about marketing, aesthetics and art and psychology(things like Myers briggs PT) and all the multi facets that you need to know for a SOCIAL(people relationships) network. People that love to program machines use to have a defined personality, the most difficult thing for them to understand is that there are other personalities as well that are different from them.
- tychobrahe 15y ago
  Actually, in the line you quoted, he's saying we need more academics (instead of amateurs) to solve the P =? NP problem, not to build decentralized social networks.
- StavrosK 15y ago
  It was a metaphor.

mcantelon 15y ago

>There is the widespread — but often unstated and always unexamined — belief among the participants that moving to a decentralized setting is a magic cure-all for the problems that ail today's status quo, such as privacy and interoperability. It's an improvement over data sitting in a central silo waiting to be mined and monitored. How would you suggest tackling the problem?

wmf 15y ago
It's an improvement over data sitting in a central silo waiting to be mined and monitored. I think this is a perfect example of the subtlety of the issues. Let's imagine that Diaspora succeeds and Facebook, MySpace, and Google+ all adopt its federation protocol; in that case it's likely that all of those companies would have access to most of what you post, effectively reducing privacy.
- misterbee 15y ago
  But they'd only each have the subset of your data that you choose to publish on their respective networks, right?
  - wmf 15y ago
    To give a specific example, if you friend someone on Facebook from Diaspora then Facebook would probably have cached copies of any data you publish that is accessible by that friend, including all your public data. (I guess you would have to agree to Facebook's TOS when you friend that person, even though you don't have a Facebook account.)

neilk 15y ago

I have a bet with random_walker that a distributed social network will gain significant traction by 2014. http://twitter.com/#!/flipzagging/status/16766878672228352 http://twitter.com/#!/flipzagging/status/16766878672228352 Diaspora is a sad story: a team with great intentions but little systems experience, becoming the standard-bearer for distributed social networking. They gained attention from some random factors (frustration with Facebook at a peak, NYtimes story, Kickstarter). I think the odds of there being a single winner-take-all provider of social networking services (SNS), forever and ever, are slight. The idea that kids are going to stick with the SNS their mom uses to play Farmville seems ridiculous to me. So we should see some amount of fragmentation, eventually. It also seems absurd to me that Facebook will remain agile enough to shut out competitors while also supporting 500M+ users. At some point, a situation should arise where competitor SNS services will find it to their advantage to be interoperable. That could end in an oligopoly, but that still counts as a more distributed social network. Larry Page often likes to say "don't bet against the internet". And I am old enough to remember when people thought that Microsoft's Project Blackbird was going to kill the web. I am confident that SNS, like almost all internet services, will be commodified at some point, and probably sooner than we expect. Caveat: this hasn't quite worked out for instant messaging, so I could be wrong.

socratic 15y ago
Those bet terms seem really odd. Your bet is that within 3 years, there will be a distributed social network with at least 1M users? Am I reading that correctly? Google Plus, which people aren't even really sure is a success yet, had 10 million users in less than a month. Is there some reason that you chose the number 1M as significant traction? If anything, those terms suggest to me that you're not really convinced it's going to happen.
- scrame 15y ago
  Google Plus is not distributed, and they gained most of their users rolling over from gmail.
  - socratic 15y ago

ugh 15y ago

I wasn’t really aware that computer science went into research directions like that. It seems either like classic social science (in this case communication studies) territory or like business economics territory. What approach are you taking when looking at budding and failed social networks? Did you do a quantitative study or were you looking for patterns in a more qualitative fashion?

randomwalker 15y ago
It's a purely qualitative study. You're right, it's a bit outside the normal ambit of computer science. I'm interested in multidisciplinary questions; we do also have non computer scientists among the authors, for example Prof. Nissenbaum http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/ http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/ Overall, as you suggest, our analysis is a mixture of CS, economics and social science.
jdp23 15y ago
Computer science _is_ a social science* -- especially when it comes to success and failure of a social network. You can't separate the software from the social and organizational context it's used in. * more at http://achangeiscoming.net/docs/cssocsci.html http://achangeiscoming.net/docs/cssocsci.html
- Locke1689 15y ago
  That's going to be a hard sell. I do research in programming languages now and I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that the fundamental nature of my work is a social science. Especially since the initiating paper included a proof of correctness...
  - jdp23 15y ago
    Well, it's not _just_ a social science. There's still plenty of interesting work to do with 1's and 0's and proofs. But even in "hard CS" areas like programming languages, the social since aspects are pretty significant. What influences the success of new languages and evolutions of existing ones? Why haven't some obviously good featuers like pre- and post-conditions and invariants been better integrated by most mainstream languages? How to make functional programming accessible to a lot more people?

protomyth 15y ago

I thought usenet would be a better starting point for how todo it.

Tichy 15y ago
And I thought email.
- protomyth 15y ago
  SMTP is not quite as close to the goal as NNTP.

ianb 15y ago

I feel like it's a form of opportunity cost that creates an imperials debt. Decentralization, and even more so all the motivations that lead developers down the path of decentralization, has nothing to do with making a good social network. It's like all the solar-powered cars... a cute idea, but no one ever (ever) buys a car for fuel efficiency. You buy a car to travel, to carry things. So the solar cars are cute, but they fail at everything a car is supposed to do. You can't possibly improve on something unless you start by implementing the thing.

forgottenpaswrd 15y ago

PS: If you knew what you are doing, you will never start: Donald Knut said that if he knew the work that it would be when he started typography, he would never had done it( this means no TeX, and Latex, and art of CS books). Steve Jobs and Wozniak said that if they knew what they were to do when they created Apple, they would had never started it. About being "hard", I don't think it was harder for this twenty something to create facebook than other SN. He just did it right.

forgottenpaswrd 15y ago

"or do we tell him to learn some math and CS first, and gain an appreciation for why the problem is hard and probably not worth taking on unless you really really know what you're doing?" The problem IS learning more math and CS, because odds are the people that make "yet another social network" already know about math and computer science as they use to be geeks. So you are an academic and you believe they need more academics. What they don't know is about marketing, aesthetics and art and psychology(things like Myers briggs PT) and all the multi facets that you need to know for a SOCIAL(people relationships) network. People that love to program machines use to have a defined personality, the most difficult thing for them to understand is that there are other personalities as well that are different from them.

tychobrahe 15y ago
Actually, in the line you quoted, he's saying we need more academics (instead of amateurs) to solve the P =? NP problem, not to build decentralized social networks.
StavrosK 15y ago
It was a metaphor.