41–50 of 383 posts
Why do all "social networks" have to be a feed of news? Couldn't anyone think of anything better than a system in which people are only encouraged to talk about themselves and try to get other people's approval? In which having more "friends" is always better, because you have more potential for self-agrandissement in your narcissistic posts?
So... it's kinna like USENET then?
Not that this is a bad thing. There's still life in USENet, and a fair few people still sit and discuss things in various groups (if you know where to look)[1]. The backbone concept of USENet is still great from a decentralised point of view - someone just needs to add some crypto layers to it (as a standard), and I reckon it could rise again like a phoenix.
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[1] I'm deliberately and totally ignoring the large elephant in the room with HDDs full of pirate software, media, and porn.
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Make backups. How is this any different than saving photos just in case you spill water on your laptop keyboard?
It's different precisely because most social/cloud networks abstract away backups. Very few people have considered whether or not they should attempt to back up their Facebook account. Same's true for Flickr, Twitter, and Gmail.
So... it's kinna like USENET then?
Not sure why this was donvoted. From a bird's eye view, the whole system looks remarkably similar to Usenet, especially in the old times of UUCP, back when systems were mostly offline and had relatively short timespans to exchange information (via dial-up connection or similar). What's different now is that we have pleny of disk space, and more than enough computing power to perform proper cryptography.
The storage requirements are tremendous, though, right? If I want to have access to everything that's been shared with me, I have to store it all. In the case of images, the storage burden can get large quickly.
The flipside to your remark is, that it is fully offline capable and I'm perfectly happy with that. Also: contrast it with how much space a thunderbird profile takes up.
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How about this: you buy a physical device at Wal-Mart for $29.99, plug it in, hook it up to your wifi and leave it plugged into an outlet. It's got Mastodon or GNU Social on it and could look like this, but branded: http://thegadgetflow.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/SmartPlu...
Then I have yet another device permanently plugged in and running, at a time where I and frankly all of us should try to reduce our energy consumption.
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Make backups. How is this any different than saving photos just in case you spill water on your laptop keyboard?
It's different precisely because most social/cloud networks abstract away backups. Very few people have considered whether or not they should attempt to back up their Facebook account. Same's true for Flickr, Twitter, and Gmail.
I'm probably in the minority being so irresponsible with my own backups, but I'm not alone.
Google and Facebook have a lot on the line with regard to user trust of their reliability. Also, they can't monetize data that they've lost.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Make backups. How is this any different than saving photos just in case you spill water on your laptop keyboard?
It's different precisely because most social/cloud networks abstract away backups. Very few people have considered whether or not they should attempt to back up their Facebook account. Same's true for Flickr, Twitter, and Gmail.
The storage requirements are tremendous, though, right? If I want to have access to everything that's been shared with me, I have to store it all. In the case of images, the storage burden can get large quickly.
I've been thinking about this very thing the past few days! Forgive the rambling, this is the first time I've written any of this down... My idea is to use email as a transport for 'social attachments' that would be read using a custom mail client (it remains to be seen if it should be your regular email client or have it be just your 'social mail' client. But... if using another client as regular email, users would…