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0 pointsmichaelchisari15y ago0 comments

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.

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4 comments · 1 top-level

ubernostrum15y ago· 3 in thread

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.

michaelchisariOP15y 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?

nkassis15y ago

So what your saying is everyone would have access to all the data?

Not exactly better in my view.

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loup-vaillant15y ago

You are assuming that a usable FreedomBox¹ cannot exist. I don't believe that. Debian, Ubuntu, Firefox… demonstrate this is feasible. And there's even less of a UI problem: it'll all go through HTTP.

Imagine a plug&play thingy, which you configure by subscribing to one and only one online-looking service. One subscription for e-mail, instant messaging, Blog, "social" thing, and more. No ads, private infos at home, encryption everywhere, no need to trust any big corporation, reliable automatic backup…

Even my mom would want that.

[1]: http://freedomboxfoundation.org/

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