5 ms·

I think this is actually an argument for open protocols. If Google put this clause in the terms of service for Gmail, you could switch to Yahoo! Mail, or you co

by graue 14y ago

I think this is actually an argument for open protocols. If Google put this clause in the terms of service for Gmail, you could switch to Yahoo! Mail, or you could switch to Fastmail.fm, or whatever else. But when it's a proprietary social network, you can't switch (in practice), because all your friends and followees are on Instagram - not the other thing that you switch to. When services interoperate using open, decentralized protocols, competitive pressure helps keep a lot of the ugly stuff out of their Terms of Service. We all win. But with Instagram, or Twitter, or Facebook, one company has a complete monopoly on a particular combination of (functionality + approximation of social graph). Competition is locked out, and only regulation can prevent the company from doing whatever they want.

X-Istence 14y ago
No I couldn't switch, unfortunately my username is at gmail.com, I don't get to chose to change providers and keep that same address. You can forward it you say, sure I can, but at that point Google still gets to use my information as it pleases.
- lazerwalker 14y ago
  That's an argument for custom domains: if your email address is [yourname]@[yourdomain].com, it's easy to switch from Google Apps to a different provider. Finding a way to make that a viable option for non-techies is, sadly, an exercise left for the reader.
  - X-Istence 14y ago
    Absolutely. As a techie I have regeer.org registered, so bertjw@regeer.org can be move anywhere I want. However I was simply bringing up that it isn't easy to move email providers.
  - pi18n 14y ago
    Making it a viable option would be simple, convincing people that they need it would be the trick.
simula67 14y ago
Just to play devil's advocate, open protocols, standards etc are hard to arrive at when there are competing business interests [1][2]. Also centralized systems make for less complexity. For example, despite having a standard for almost all major programming languages like C,C++ et al, if you want to compile your program using multiple compilers you have to put in some hours. [1]http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch17s02.html http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch17s02.html [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars
- graue 14y ago
  This is true. Also, a dictatorship is much simpler than a democracy, and easier to bring about.
  - simula67 14y ago
    Worst argument in the world [ http://lesswrong.com/lw/e95/the_noncentral_fallacy_the_worst_argument_in_the/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/e95/the_noncentral_fallacy_the_worst... ]
    - graue 14y ago
      I'm not going for emotional reaction at all. Compared to a dictatorship, a democracy is more complex, harder to bring about, and yet has real benefits for the public, which, to some, justifies the effort. And all of that is also true of open protocols, compared to monopolies. Whatever your feelings, the analogy holds.
      - simula67 14y ago
        My point was that dismissing centralized services by equating with dictatorship was useless. In a true dictatorship, the dictator rules over by means of force, and has no commitment to subjects other than to keep the fear going. Equating that with a capitalist centralized service such as Facebook, twitter etc is not accurate since for them the product is the attention of their users and it is in their best interests to keep the users happy. Now that is naively optimistic and considering that the people running these organizations are rational. I for one will happily switch to a decentralized version for a service as personal as Facebook ( so long as my friends are on it ). My intention was to balance the argument since it is very easy to take your comment and interpret it as de-centralized is the "total awesomeness". Clearly, you have strong feelings about this, as you are working on tent. So my question is, have you asked yourself if there are cases where centralization is better ?
wting 14y ago
I think you mean control of your data, rather than open protocols. For example, you can still access your Gmail via IMAP. It would be great if users could have a decentralized store of the private data, and merely gave websites or applications access to the data. Unfortunately this is a privacy geek's pipe dream, as data hosting costs and complexity would result in low adoption rates (e.g. setting up your own OAuth server). On a side note, this is a another area where Google+ falls behind Facebook. Facebook is a platform for other apps. Sometimes this results in stuff like Zynga spam, but there are good use cases such as allowing Twitter / Instagram apps to post in more than one location. Vic Gundotra has stated in interviews that Google wants a single conversation thread rather than have it fractured across different platforms, but that strategy is an all or nothing approach and they're late to the social networking game.
- graue 14y ago
  > ...users could have a decentralized store of the private data, and merely gave websites or applications access to the data. I have to ask, are you familiar with Tent? (https://tent.io https://tent.io) You just described exactly what they are setting out to do (and on a basic, somewhat limited level, already do). I agree the effort faces serious challenges, but as I hoped to illustrate with my email analogy, it doesn't require every user to set up their own server to benefit. You could choose between keeping your data with a hypothetical GTent, or Yahoo! Tent, or Fasttent.fm, whichever one had the best policies, ad-supported or, if you prefer, paid.
  - nwh 14y ago
    The issue with a distributed social network is that it doesn't scale well, and there's no amount of tricky coding that can change that. Imagine I have a thousand friends on a distributed Facebook-clone. I post a photo, and that instantly gets pushed to anywhere up to one thousand different servers. Every server has to store a copy and index it. If that was a 1MB image, I just pushed a solid gigabyte of data out. Pushing an album of 50 photos pushes that to 50GB, or 5% of my dedicated servers allocated bandwidth for one users photo album. There's no way an individual or group is going to be able to host their own servers. The whole system just dissolves down to a single large provider serving the vast majority of people, and we're back to Facebook again. It's a great idea when you sketch it out on paper, but it becomes impractical very rapidly.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
debacle 14y ago
All open protocols do is a create a race to create the cheapest product for service providers. If they were beneficial in any way for business, we would see far more of them.

by graue 14y ago

X-Istence 14y ago

No I couldn't switch, unfortunately my username is at gmail.com, I don't get to chose to change providers and keep that same address. You can forward it you say, sure I can, but at that point Google still gets to use my information as it pleases.

lazerwalker 14y ago
That's an argument for custom domains: if your email address is [yourname]@[yourdomain].com, it's easy to switch from Google Apps to a different provider. Finding a way to make that a viable option for non-techies is, sadly, an exercise left for the reader.
- X-Istence 14y ago
  Absolutely. As a techie I have regeer.org registered, so bertjw@regeer.org can be move anywhere I want. However I was simply bringing up that it isn't easy to move email providers.
- pi18n 14y ago
  Making it a viable option would be simple, convincing people that they need it would be the trick.

simula67 14y ago

Just to play devil's advocate, open protocols, standards etc are hard to arrive at when there are competing business interests [1][2]. Also centralized systems make for less complexity. For example, despite having a standard for almost all major programming languages like C,C++ et al, if you want to compile your program using multiple compilers you have to put in some hours. [1]http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch17s02.html http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch17s02.html [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars

graue 14y ago
This is true. Also, a dictatorship is much simpler than a democracy, and easier to bring about.
- simula67 14y ago
  Worst argument in the world [ http://lesswrong.com/lw/e95/the_noncentral_fallacy_the_worst_argument_in_the/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/e95/the_noncentral_fallacy_the_worst... ]
  - graue 14y ago
    I'm not going for emotional reaction at all. Compared to a dictatorship, a democracy is more complex, harder to bring about, and yet has real benefits for the public, which, to some, justifies the effort. And all of that is also true of open protocols, compared to monopolies. Whatever your feelings, the analogy holds.
    - simula67 14y ago
      My point was that dismissing centralized services by equating with dictatorship was useless. In a true dictatorship, the dictator rules over by means of force, and has no commitment to subjects other than to keep the fear going. Equating that with a capitalist centralized service such as Facebook, twitter etc is not accurate since for them the product is the attention of their users and it is in their best interests to keep the users happy. Now that is naively optimistic and considering that the people running these organizations are rational. I for one will happily switch to a decentralized version for a service as personal as Facebook ( so long as my friends are on it ). My intention was to balance the argument since it is very easy to take your comment and interpret it as de-centralized is the "total awesomeness". Clearly, you have strong feelings about this, as you are working on tent. So my question is, have you asked yourself if there are cases where centralization is better ?

wting 14y ago

I think you mean control of your data, rather than open protocols. For example, you can still access your Gmail via IMAP. It would be great if users could have a decentralized store of the private data, and merely gave websites or applications access to the data. Unfortunately this is a privacy geek's pipe dream, as data hosting costs and complexity would result in low adoption rates (e.g. setting up your own OAuth server). On a side note, this is a another area where Google+ falls behind Facebook. Facebook is a platform for other apps. Sometimes this results in stuff like Zynga spam, but there are good use cases such as allowing Twitter / Instagram apps to post in more than one location. Vic Gundotra has stated in interviews that Google wants a single conversation thread rather than have it fractured across different platforms, but that strategy is an all or nothing approach and they're late to the social networking game.

graue 14y ago
> ...users could have a decentralized store of the private data, and merely gave websites or applications access to the data. I have to ask, are you familiar with Tent? (https://tent.io https://tent.io) You just described exactly what they are setting out to do (and on a basic, somewhat limited level, already do). I agree the effort faces serious challenges, but as I hoped to illustrate with my email analogy, it doesn't require every user to set up their own server to benefit. You could choose between keeping your data with a hypothetical GTent, or Yahoo! Tent, or Fasttent.fm, whichever one had the best policies, ad-supported or, if you prefer, paid.
- nwh 14y ago
  The issue with a distributed social network is that it doesn't scale well, and there's no amount of tricky coding that can change that. Imagine I have a thousand friends on a distributed Facebook-clone. I post a photo, and that instantly gets pushed to anywhere up to one thousand different servers. Every server has to store a copy and index it. If that was a 1MB image, I just pushed a solid gigabyte of data out. Pushing an album of 50 photos pushes that to 50GB, or 5% of my dedicated servers allocated bandwidth for one users photo album. There's no way an individual or group is going to be able to host their own servers. The whole system just dissolves down to a single large provider serving the vast majority of people, and we're back to Facebook again. It's a great idea when you sketch it out on paper, but it becomes impractical very rapidly.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

debacle 14y ago

All open protocols do is a create a race to create the cheapest product for service providers. If they were beneficial in any way for business, we would see far more of them.