Decentralized Social Networks Won't Work

I have given some thought to this problem and I think it's technically solvable. The main problem is that it would be non-profit so less incentive to build it. Anyone want to kick around ideas?

> Arguably, home routers are servers. People routinely "operate" home routers. So, people routinely operate their own servers.

This is quite arguable, as most people plug in a router, or even more commonly, have Comcast do it for them.

And you are closer to the mark with the "configuration of a linux distribution on the command line" bit. Look at adoption rates for GPG and some of the blog posts/comments on it. [1],[2]

If Security Professionals are giving up on what is not a wholly complex system in general, it sets a fairly clear bar on what is acceptable anymore and what isn't. Apple's Messages, Signal, Telegram, any of these chats with the built-in End to End Encryption is what is mostly needs to be; you just open the application, and the work is done. Of course, this means in some way centralization and trusting a monolithic org to play nice.

Currently a lot of the social media alternatives fall victim either to the lack of traction or the complexity of participation, and adhering to the privacy and security ideals sometimes requries complexity.

Don't get me wrong, I'm firmly in the RTFM camp and protect your privacy by whatever means, but that means concessions, and often concessions people don't want to give. Malware would be cut in half if people just ran NoScript, but that would break a lot and require some knowledge of what happens on the pages they go to. People would probably be happier with alternative social media platforms that are more communication focused, but that requires sometimes more configuration than they're willing to bother with.

The ideas proposed by alternative systems typically aren't that new to begin with and have been around for ages - when complexity is a requirement for the technology, there isn't really a post-enthusiast era. Many tech leaps were very simple on release; consider BitTorrent. Get client, download torrent, a file appears. It was pretty magical, and new.

[1] - https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/12/giving_up_on_... (comment from Schneier on [2], agreeing) [2] - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/12/op-ed...

> This is quite arguable, as most people plug in a router, or even more commonly, have Comcast do it for them.

And yet, they are not limited to communicating with other comcast customers.

Whether that would be the best model for social networks, I don't know, but I think it is important to recognize that you do not need every individual to build their "server" from scratch to achieve some meaningful benefits of decentralization. If comcast doesn't like you, they cannot cut you off from the internet, and that is already a pretty big advantage over walled gardens.

I guess that gets at the point that the term social network is poorly defined.

Here is the problem I have with most advertised decentralized social networks. Their only added value is being decentralized. Decentralized twitter / facebook / instagram. What do you gain from using those decentralized things? Nothing aside from being a hipster. And you lose your current social connections. Even worse, decentralized solutions existed before and are still available: blog software, bulletin boards, IRC, even mails.

So if you want people to create their own hubs they should get something for their effort. I don't have a solution there but something as stupid as being able to watch some show with 6 or 8 participants all over the world could be a start. Even the old Google Wave (I think it was), the mix of chat, code, wiki which was too slow for a webapp at the time should be reconsidered. Maybe with native clients.