5 ms·

I really, really wish an Open Source alternative to Facebook and Twitter would happen so we can put the proprietary social era behind us.

by alpine 14y ago

biomechanica 14y ago
Well, there is Diaspora, heh. Personally, I think the future of "social networks" will, in a sense, go back in time once again where it will be peer to peer, encrypted end to end. I think the guys working on the Freedom Box are trying to crack the riddle.
- Joeboy 14y ago
  > Personally, I think the future of "social networks" will, in a sense, go back in time once again where it will be peer to peer, encrypted end to end. Except, people like to use Facebook as a broadcast medium, and the message size is likely to get prohibitively large if you're encrypting to a lot of people.
  - vog 14y ago
    > and the message size is likely to get prohibitively large if you're encrypting to a lot of people Do you have any evidence of this strange claim? Encrypting a message to lots of recipients in an efficient way has been solved for email (via OpenPGP / GPG) a long time ago. It is a positive side effect of the hybrid algorithms which combine symmetric with asymmetric algorithms, originally introduced to reduce computation time for classic (single-recipient) asymmetric cryptography.
    - Joeboy 14y ago
      You obviously know more about this than I do, so it's likely that you're right and I'm wrong. But: To me, it seems unlikely that encrypting a message to thousands of recipients (a fairly normal use case for FB) isn't going to massively increase the message size. It sounds like you're going to have to include encrypted key data for each of those recipients, and while I can believe there might be surprisingly efficient ways of doing that, I have a hard time believing it's not going to lead to extremely large status update messages.
  - biomechanica 14y ago
    I agree. It's not perfect. I guess I was thinking more along the lines of the actual network it sits on will help, too. Like CJDNS, an added protective layer for privacy, at least. Public key encryption generated automatically for each user using the freedom box (I think I watched a video of someone explaining their concept of this for the freedom box). In the end, I don't know. I'm only starting to get involved.
sohn23 14y ago
Identi.ca
crafter 14y ago
But do we really need an open source social network? Do we need more/different online social networks when there is so much out there already? Why don't people just use preexisting technologies like email? What's the obsession with social networks anyway? Let's rethink this and come up with something radically different. There is a alternative, all inclusive solution right under our noses...
- biomechanica 14y ago
  Well, the very first of these social networks is, I would say, the Internet itself. Facebook, MySpace and co., are/were basically trying to bring all that traffic to a single place where they could take advantage of the sharing. I agree, there should be something created completely different. However, I don't think that can really be achieved. I think it can be made to look different but in the end it will just be a different implementation of the same thing. I think the next big thing won't be necessarily social networking. Social is basically an expected feature of all new software. There is nothing new to be had there. People like to share things and talk with friends, meet new people, etc. That won't change. The appearance will change and the technology that becomes big will have all of that stuff in it. I just hope it's free software and disconnected from a centralized source. Personally, I think the next big thing will be accidentally created by the "the people" and not some corporation.
  - crafter 14y ago
    I don't think that can really be achieved I'm sorry, I didn't understand that part. Is that another language?
    - biomechanica 14y ago
      Well, in the context of making a new Facebook that is as successful, no I don't think it can be achieved. I go on to explain what can be achieved, though.
rabidsnail 14y ago
You mean email (or maybe email+vCard)? Actually, to make that work I think you'd need to add three things: 1. An extension to the vCard format to represent relationships (maybe this already exists? can you embed RDF triplets in vCard?) 2. A plugin for the popular mail servers that displays vCard info of its users as html in response to web requests (with appropriate RDFa metadata). 3. Some way to make an http request that proves "I am johndoe@example.com" or "I am the mail server responsible for johndoe@example.com" so that servers could make a distinction between private data, public data, and "friends only" data. Maybe have a chain of trust that starts with DNSSEC keys?
- vog 14y ago
  >1. An extension to the vCard format to represent relationships (maybe this already exists? can you embed RDF triplets in vCard?) There is FOAF ("friend-of-a-friend", based on RDF). At the moment, this is mostly provided by websites (such as identi.ca), but could also be transferred via E-Mail. There might be some way to embed FOAF into vCard, but why should be care? E-Mail allows for more than one attachment ...
- crafter 14y ago
  Email + vCard - plugin (to keep it dirt simple, streamlined and to reduce friction and increase adoption) is what I was thinking.
  - rabidsnail 14y ago
    Without the plugin people won't be findable in Google (which is/was one of the major drivers of adoption for Facebook). Also there'd be no way to look people up that you haven't been in contact with (a la finger).
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
superuser2 14y ago
Open source only makes sense for a social network if it's federated, in which case you're talking about Diaspora.
- taligent 14y ago
  Exactly we have open source social network already. Nobody cares about Diaspora. Because at the end of the day user experience is order of magnitudes more important than some arbitrary geek obsession with being open. Which isn't important for most people since they are used to having their personal information owned by third parties e.g. banks, employers, insurance companies, government.
  - lukeschlather 14y ago
    Banks are open. My bank has all my information and is responsible for it, sure. But if I want to take my money somewhere else, there's nothing the bank can do about it. I can still transfer money to anyone I like via check, ACH, or credit. Banks are open. Facebook is not. Government is somewhat closed, but it also has an army and isn't going anywhere soon. Facebook is not trustworthy as a single source of truth.
    - taligent 14y ago
      I see you don't understand the network effects of banking. Many people can't switch banks because of commitments like home, car and personal loans which in the majority of cases don't seamlessly transition to their new bank. It is such a big issue that many countries e.g. Australia, UK have actively put in place policies specifically to address it. And my point still stands that the overwhelming majority of people are comfortable with their most private data being in the hands of third parties. And Facebook has long reached that point where people can trust it for managing their semi-private data.
    - superuser2 14y ago
      You are totally free to switch to any form of communication anytime you choose, it's just inconvenient. And Facebook does provide a comprehensive export of your data on request. Switching banks is inconvenient too, especially if you have outstanding loans.
DanBC 14y ago
I'd prefer a standards-based approach. Define an open standard for a message; a photo-share; tagging; etc etc. Include stuff that clients and servers MUST do, or MUST NOT do. Write a nice server, and host it. Write a nice client (Browser extensions? Website?) Now you have an open ecosystem that is as flexible as people want it to be. There's a reason that all discussion sites end up being a worse implementation of Usenet.
- Silhouette 14y ago
  I'd prefer a standards-based approach. Exactly. The problem isn't that we don't have useful social networks. The problem is that we have too many of them, with varying heights of wall between their respective gardens that make interoperability and data migration absurdly difficult in many cases. I suspect the roadblock is that these networks are tied together by the underlying concepts of identities and relationships, but for many valid reasons a lot of people would like to present different identities in different contexts or treat some relationships differently to others. Until there is some reasonably standardised approach (or set of compatible approaches) to representing these ideas, there's no robust foundation so you can build different kinds of messaging and content sharings systems on top. That in turn leads to practical issues of authentication and trust networks, and we haven't completely solved those problems in a way that Just Works for non-technical users yet.
  - awakeasleep 14y ago
    Consider the ecosystem of the internet plus phones and computers as "the social network". You'll see what we have actually works how you'd like, right now. Facebook lets you talk to your old friends, twitter lets you meet new ones, and google plus is there if you want to get serious. Tumblr for a more expressive context, and wordpress for the rest. The problem with creating a new social network is that you'd have to replicate a dozen companies with varying degrees of porosity in their services. Add to that my second point: we don't know what we want yet. Things are still evolving and developing, in a high pressure cauldron of talent and money. Once things cool down and take shape we'll see what we like and someone will spend time making open source plugins. It's a really fun time to play on computers.
mseebach 14y ago
The nut to crack isn't writing the software. That's (in comparison) trivial, it's been done over and over again. The nut to crack is to allow a user to transfer the network effects he currently has on Facebook to a new network.
- slurgfest 14y ago
  What is the best open alternative currently usable? Do you have a URL? Obviously the problem of porting the data is 100% up to Facebook to allow, which I strongly doubt it will ever do (what is its commercial interest in allowing that?)
  - Joeboy 14y ago
    > What is the best open alternative currently usable? Do you have a URL? The much derided Diaspora (sign up at http://diasp.org http://diasp.org) works perfectly well for Facebook's core functionality, and is fairly pleasant to use.
  - mseebach 14y ago
    "Porting the data" isn't the problem. Porting your friends is. Nobody is on Facebook because they have all their data on there - they are there because their friends are there. The issue of writing the software, even the issue of data export, pales to total insignificance next to the problem of exporting the network effects. I didn't say that many open source implementations exists, just that many implementations exists. Diaspora might be a good candidate for a software stack, but the point is that having some social networking software is utterly pointless if you don't have a way of getting users onto it.
RexRollman 14y ago
I think what we need is to find a way to have a non-profit organization run a social networking site, perhaps run by something like a cross between Debian and Wikipedia groups. Of course, the real problem with that would be paying for it. Hardware and bandwidth isn't free and it seems like most people are unwilling to pay anything for social networking.

I really, really wish an Open Source alternative to Facebook and Twitter would happen so we can put the proprietary social era behind us.

by alpine 14y ago

I really, really wish an Open Source alternative to Facebook and Twitter would happen so we can put the proprietary social era behind us.

biomechanica 14y ago

Well, there is Diaspora, heh. Personally, I think the future of "social networks" will, in a sense, go back in time once again where it will be peer to peer, encrypted end to end. I think the guys working on the Freedom Box are trying to crack the riddle.

Joeboy 14y ago
> Personally, I think the future of "social networks" will, in a sense, go back in time once again where it will be peer to peer, encrypted end to end. Except, people like to use Facebook as a broadcast medium, and the message size is likely to get prohibitively large if you're encrypting to a lot of people.
- vog 14y ago
  > and the message size is likely to get prohibitively large if you're encrypting to a lot of people Do you have any evidence of this strange claim? Encrypting a message to lots of recipients in an efficient way has been solved for email (via OpenPGP / GPG) a long time ago. It is a positive side effect of the hybrid algorithms which combine symmetric with asymmetric algorithms, originally introduced to reduce computation time for classic (single-recipient) asymmetric cryptography.
  - Joeboy 14y ago
    You obviously know more about this than I do, so it's likely that you're right and I'm wrong. But: To me, it seems unlikely that encrypting a message to thousands of recipients (a fairly normal use case for FB) isn't going to massively increase the message size. It sounds like you're going to have to include encrypted key data for each of those recipients, and while I can believe there might be surprisingly efficient ways of doing that, I have a hard time believing it's not going to lead to extremely large status update messages.
- biomechanica 14y ago
  I agree. It's not perfect. I guess I was thinking more along the lines of the actual network it sits on will help, too. Like CJDNS, an added protective layer for privacy, at least. Public key encryption generated automatically for each user using the freedom box (I think I watched a video of someone explaining their concept of this for the freedom box). In the end, I don't know. I'm only starting to get involved.

sohn23 14y ago

Identi.ca

crafter 14y ago

But do we really need an open source social network? Do we need more/different online social networks when there is so much out there already? Why don't people just use preexisting technologies like email? What's the obsession with social networks anyway? Let's rethink this and come up with something radically different. There is a alternative, all inclusive solution right under our noses...

biomechanica 14y ago
Well, the very first of these social networks is, I would say, the Internet itself. Facebook, MySpace and co., are/were basically trying to bring all that traffic to a single place where they could take advantage of the sharing. I agree, there should be something created completely different. However, I don't think that can really be achieved. I think it can be made to look different but in the end it will just be a different implementation of the same thing. I think the next big thing won't be necessarily social networking. Social is basically an expected feature of all new software. There is nothing new to be had there. People like to share things and talk with friends, meet new people, etc. That won't change. The appearance will change and the technology that becomes big will have all of that stuff in it. I just hope it's free software and disconnected from a centralized source. Personally, I think the next big thing will be accidentally created by the "the people" and not some corporation.
- crafter 14y ago
  I don't think that can really be achieved I'm sorry, I didn't understand that part. Is that another language?
  - biomechanica 14y ago
    Well, in the context of making a new Facebook that is as successful, no I don't think it can be achieved. I go on to explain what can be achieved, though.

rabidsnail 14y ago

You mean email (or maybe email+vCard)? Actually, to make that work I think you'd need to add three things: 1. An extension to the vCard format to represent relationships (maybe this already exists? can you embed RDF triplets in vCard?) 2. A plugin for the popular mail servers that displays vCard info of its users as html in response to web requests (with appropriate RDFa metadata). 3. Some way to make an http request that proves "I am johndoe@example.com" or "I am the mail server responsible for johndoe@example.com" so that servers could make a distinction between private data, public data, and "friends only" data. Maybe have a chain of trust that starts with DNSSEC keys?

vog 14y ago
>1. An extension to the vCard format to represent relationships (maybe this already exists? can you embed RDF triplets in vCard?) There is FOAF ("friend-of-a-friend", based on RDF). At the moment, this is mostly provided by websites (such as identi.ca), but could also be transferred via E-Mail. There might be some way to embed FOAF into vCard, but why should be care? E-Mail allows for more than one attachment ...
crafter 14y ago
Email + vCard - plugin (to keep it dirt simple, streamlined and to reduce friction and increase adoption) is what I was thinking.
- rabidsnail 14y ago
  Without the plugin people won't be findable in Google (which is/was one of the major drivers of adoption for Facebook). Also there'd be no way to look people up that you haven't been in contact with (a la finger).
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]

superuser2 14y ago

Open source only makes sense for a social network if it's federated, in which case you're talking about Diaspora.

taligent 14y ago
Exactly we have open source social network already. Nobody cares about Diaspora. Because at the end of the day user experience is order of magnitudes more important than some arbitrary geek obsession with being open. Which isn't important for most people since they are used to having their personal information owned by third parties e.g. banks, employers, insurance companies, government.
- lukeschlather 14y ago
  Banks are open. My bank has all my information and is responsible for it, sure. But if I want to take my money somewhere else, there's nothing the bank can do about it. I can still transfer money to anyone I like via check, ACH, or credit. Banks are open. Facebook is not. Government is somewhat closed, but it also has an army and isn't going anywhere soon. Facebook is not trustworthy as a single source of truth.
  - taligent 14y ago
    I see you don't understand the network effects of banking. Many people can't switch banks because of commitments like home, car and personal loans which in the majority of cases don't seamlessly transition to their new bank. It is such a big issue that many countries e.g. Australia, UK have actively put in place policies specifically to address it. And my point still stands that the overwhelming majority of people are comfortable with their most private data being in the hands of third parties. And Facebook has long reached that point where people can trust it for managing their semi-private data.
  - superuser2 14y ago
    You are totally free to switch to any form of communication anytime you choose, it's just inconvenient. And Facebook does provide a comprehensive export of your data on request. Switching banks is inconvenient too, especially if you have outstanding loans.

DanBC 14y ago

I'd prefer a standards-based approach. Define an open standard for a message; a photo-share; tagging; etc etc. Include stuff that clients and servers MUST do, or MUST NOT do. Write a nice server, and host it. Write a nice client (Browser extensions? Website?) Now you have an open ecosystem that is as flexible as people want it to be. There's a reason that all discussion sites end up being a worse implementation of Usenet.

Silhouette 14y ago
I'd prefer a standards-based approach. Exactly. The problem isn't that we don't have useful social networks. The problem is that we have too many of them, with varying heights of wall between their respective gardens that make interoperability and data migration absurdly difficult in many cases. I suspect the roadblock is that these networks are tied together by the underlying concepts of identities and relationships, but for many valid reasons a lot of people would like to present different identities in different contexts or treat some relationships differently to others. Until there is some reasonably standardised approach (or set of compatible approaches) to representing these ideas, there's no robust foundation so you can build different kinds of messaging and content sharings systems on top. That in turn leads to practical issues of authentication and trust networks, and we haven't completely solved those problems in a way that Just Works for non-technical users yet.
- awakeasleep 14y ago
  Consider the ecosystem of the internet plus phones and computers as "the social network". You'll see what we have actually works how you'd like, right now. Facebook lets you talk to your old friends, twitter lets you meet new ones, and google plus is there if you want to get serious. Tumblr for a more expressive context, and wordpress for the rest. The problem with creating a new social network is that you'd have to replicate a dozen companies with varying degrees of porosity in their services. Add to that my second point: we don't know what we want yet. Things are still evolving and developing, in a high pressure cauldron of talent and money. Once things cool down and take shape we'll see what we like and someone will spend time making open source plugins. It's a really fun time to play on computers.

mseebach 14y ago

The nut to crack isn't writing the software. That's (in comparison) trivial, it's been done over and over again. The nut to crack is to allow a user to transfer the network effects he currently has on Facebook to a new network.

slurgfest 14y ago
What is the best open alternative currently usable? Do you have a URL? Obviously the problem of porting the data is 100% up to Facebook to allow, which I strongly doubt it will ever do (what is its commercial interest in allowing that?)
- Joeboy 14y ago
  > What is the best open alternative currently usable? Do you have a URL? The much derided Diaspora (sign up at http://diasp.org http://diasp.org) works perfectly well for Facebook's core functionality, and is fairly pleasant to use.
- mseebach 14y ago
  "Porting the data" isn't the problem. Porting your friends is. Nobody is on Facebook because they have all their data on there - they are there because their friends are there. The issue of writing the software, even the issue of data export, pales to total insignificance next to the problem of exporting the network effects. I didn't say that many open source implementations exists, just that many implementations exists. Diaspora might be a good candidate for a software stack, but the point is that having some social networking software is utterly pointless if you don't have a way of getting users onto it.

RexRollman 14y ago

I think what we need is to find a way to have a non-profit organization run a social networking site, perhaps run by something like a cross between Debian and Wikipedia groups. Of course, the real problem with that would be paying for it. Hardware and bandwidth isn't free and it seems like most people are unwilling to pay anything for social networking.