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Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

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Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#41

Post by jshelly »

bhhaskin wrote: post #20

I think the solution is pretty simple. Keep building things. Make person websites and build communities. Don't host everything on major hosting providers like Google or Amazon. Don't rely on Facebook or Google for login or integrations. They only have so much power because we let them. It's more often than not the easier solution. Use tools like GPG, IRC, Email and encourage your friends and family to do the same. Th…

I have a love hate relationship with oAuth, and I completely agree with you statement.

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#42

Post by Tharkun »

My biggest gripe with the "modern internet" is e-mail. MS and Google dominate the e-mail scene, and they are making it ever more unpleasant to run your own mailserver. They will frequently blackhole mails, without bounces, warnings or any recourse.

I'm not sure what can be done about that, but it's certainly becoming an up hill battle.

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#43

Post by mundo »

ellius wrote: post #37
TulliusCicero wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're kidding yourself if you think people actually want to run their own server for the purposes of social networking.

I do wonder though if you could create a compelling product that would keep the customer from ever knowing they "own" a server. I've thought about a service where I effectively would run one big "load balancer" front end that would route a customer's traffic entirely to prefab cloud servers that I would spin up & configure via tools like Terraform and Ansible on the back end. I wanted to load those mainly with privac…

There is a chicken-and-egg thing too - it's not normal for Joe Internetuser to have a $5/mo cloud server in addition to his Netflix/Hulu/etc because there is no easy-to-use-for-regular-people software to run on one, and no one builds such software because such users don't have $5/mo cloud servers to run it on. This is sort of the fatal flaw of app portals like Sandstorm, but it doesn't need to be that way forever.

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#44

Post by warkdarrior »

ellius wrote: post #37
TulliusCicero wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're kidding yourself if you think people actually want to run their own server for the purposes of social networking.

I do wonder though if you could create a compelling product that would keep the customer from ever knowing they "own" a server. I've thought about a service where I effectively would run one big "load balancer" front end that would route a customer's traffic entirely to prefab cloud servers that I would spin up & configure via tools like Terraform and Ansible on the back end. I wanted to load those mainly with privac…

If users do not see a visible distinction between your app portal and Facebook, why would they pay you instead of using FB for free? Is it enough to claim privacy in order to make a sale? I really doubt it.

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#45

Post by tucosan »

bhhaskin wrote: post #20

I think the solution is pretty simple. Keep building things. Make person websites and build communities. Don't host everything on major hosting providers like Google or Amazon. Don't rely on Facebook or Google for login or integrations. They only have so much power because we let them. It's more often than not the easier solution. Use tools like GPG, IRC, Email and encourage your friends and family to do the same. Th…

How many people do you know, that are able to properly use GPG (i.e. understand the pitfalls of misconfiguration, subkeys, key verification,...)? TBH, I believe the GPG ship has sailed a long time ago, even within the IT community.

Using Email does help in what way? Most people do use Mail , Gmail that is. Do you mean Email as a protocol in opposition to Whatsapp, FB Messenger?

How does not hosting on the major hosting providers solve the problems of walled gardens and filter bubbles and the closed internet? That's just ephemeral infrastructure.

Login integrations can make a lot of sense. I don't really see how not deploying integrations will protect us from walled gardens.

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#46

Post by mundo »

rhcom2 wrote: post #39
mundo wrote: post #25

Here's a thought I've been turning over for a little while now. It occurs to me that all extant social media apps have, at a high level, exactly the same requirements: 1. Allow users to upload some data to cloud storage 2. Make that data discoverable to certain other users 3. Show everyone ads Whether FB, Twitter, etc were to be dislodged by another app that is essentially the same app is not terribly interesting. So…

You might want to read about urbit [ https://www.urbit.org/ ]. I think it might be similar to your thinking.

I'm familiar with Urbit, and intrigued by it, and a big company deciding to try a project inside it is inarguably the best thing that could happen to Urbit; but I'm not very bullish on that happening, for a variety of reasons.

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#47

Post by jfktrey »

menacingly wrote: post #31
aaronpk wrote: post #14

I am a member of the W3C Social Web Working Group ( https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg ), and have been organizing IndieWebCamp ( https://indieweb.org/ ) conferences in this space for the last 7 years. We've been making a lot of progress: * https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/ - cross-site commenting * https://www.w3.org/TR/micropub/ - API for apps to create posts on various servers * https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/ - realt…

I had no idea these standards were in any phase of existence and I'm really excited about them.

Existing is one thing. Adoption is something else entirely.

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#48

Post by doublerebel »

I'm working on a project to separate data from presentation. Too much data is overly wrapped with presentation (e.g. HTML) so we are forced into using a certain display method (popular commercial web browser).

A related problem is that human readable data is often unnecessarily encoded into binary machine data. If we weren't wasting so much space on presentation, we could have just served the human-readable data.

In this future I think it will be considered ridiculous that you had to load an entire webpage full of unrelated images and icons just to read an article or weather report.

This concept will be huge for AR. In AR extra unnecessary information and uncontrollable presentation is beyond annoying, it actually makes users angry and uncomfortable.

Look out for Optik.io .

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#49

Post by na85 »

gwicks56 wrote: post #17

Be interested in what HN thinks of Maidsafe, Storj etc. Basically decentralised versions of the internet or the cloud based around blockchain technology. Storj for example is an order of magnitude cheaper than AWS, uses peoples spare hard drive space, encrypts everything and back it up using peer to peer tech. I am currently pretty comfortable as an Android dev, but I am wondering if I should start learning everythin…

I for one am strongly against anything involving blockchains, because I do not want to support the development of a world where each app has a multi-Gb blockchain to deal with.

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#50

Post by dragonwriter »

doublerebel wrote: post #48

I'm working on a project to separate data from presentation. Too much data is overly wrapped with presentation (e.g. HTML) so we are forced into using a certain display method (popular commercial web browser). A related problem is that human readable data is often unnecessarily encoded into binary machine data. If we weren't wasting so much space on presentation, we could have just served the human-readable data. In…

> Too much data is overly wrapped with presentation (HTML)

The design of HTML5 and associated web tech separates semantics (HTML) from presentation (notionally CSS, but this bleeds over into JS) and behavior (JS).

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