Of course, a Linux VPS needs a fair amount of love (fiddling with settings, updating, and so on). But there are other ways: https://sandstorm.io/
This is certainly a problem. If only there was some kind of . . . mechanism . . . by which her computer could collect photos off her friends servers and display them locally? Sounds almost impossible!
(Sorry for giving you a hard time:-) I appreciate your comment, but think that's a very solvable problem in practice.)
Your comment actually deserves a better response than I gave it. Spam is the open protocol killer. It's a totally serious issue. If our goal was to replicate HN or Reddit via only personal servers, I would be pretty dang paranoid about getting our anti-spam solution perfect:/
Happy in the case of Facebook-on-personal-servers, we have all the advantages and the spammers have all the disadvantages. Social network's main purpose is communication between people who know each other. Ignoring the Pages part of FB (which is really more Reddit-like than it is essential to a social network) communication happens between friends, or friends of friends commenting on photos or whatever. Spammy friend requests will be a problem, but that's not too big of a deal.
And then, once that's done . . . ahhhh. Your own filtering software, blocking game notifications to your heart's content (since it's your own server you can install whatever filter you want, though of course there will be good defaults). Guess where most of the unwanted posts on Twitter or Snapchat come from for me . . . Twitter and Snapchat. No more!
If you're running on someone else's platform and automatically accepting updates, are you really "administering" it yourself?
A majority of people will never develop any real skill level at administering servers. We still need them to be able to use reasonably humane software though, because the consumer software industry revolves around them. If they continue to be easy pickings for predatory software (lock-in, etc.) the incentive for industry will be to continue improving at making predatory software . . . not ideal.
So empowering normal users (even partially, Sandstorm certainly doesn't give as much freedom as becoming a unix guru or whatever) is good for expert users too.
. . .
The exact same thing. The exact same thing would happen, because the new social network would have _exactly the same incentives_ as facebook.
I have some more thoughts on this here: http://housejeffries.com/page/3 Not sure how clear my writing is, but the "Inspiration" section at the end has some links to great projects trying to fix this problem.
