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Towards a world without Facebook

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Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#31

Post by ams6110 »

eyeareque wrote: post #9

After ditichong Facebook long ago it seems amusing to me that people have such a connection with it and find it hard to leave. Sure it may seem hard at first. But your true friends will not lose contact with you. You might not know random life events about your seldom communicated with old high school peers though.

I'm not sure I can imagine the perspective of the generation that has grown up with social media for their entire memory. I was in my mid to late twenties before having a mobile phone began to become a routine thing. I myself didn't have one until I was in my thirties. I have always lived in a world without Facebook, because I never started using it. I seem to get along just fine. Not sure what all the fuss is about.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#32

Post by jasonkostempski »

"wherein users own their own data, encrypted by them, stored in the location of their choice, shared only as and when they explicitly approve"

I'm probably a little late to the party but I just now realized this is exactly DRM for the individual. I don't want anything with DRM and I don't want to impose DRM on anyone else. I dont see how one could be against DRM and for this.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#33

Post by lamename »

allannienhuis wrote: post #15
swalsh wrote: post #8

I was thinking about this a few months ago. I stopped though because I realized most user content (well in my network at least) was photos and video. Which don't belong in a block chain. In fact if you really start to unroll the implentation, a block chain is t even required. I think we just need a common protocol. Then multiple "vendors" can host the information (encrypted so they can't read it), and multiple "vendo…

That sounds like what the folks at Mastodon are trying to do. On the surface they seem to have decent implementations. But every time I think about signing up to an instance, I realise that all the friends I care about (in the social media sense) are on Facebook. It becomes a non-starter for me. The value of Facebook is the social graph, and we put up with it's shortcomings because of that.

Thanks for the mention, I'd not heard of Mastodon before, and am new to the idea of distributed social networking. It sounds appealing on the surface, but I'm trying to understand its level of privacy/security for user data. (This may be my fundamental lack of understanding of the distributed system).

They say, e.g. your data isn't harvested for ad revenue -- how does one verify this? Is the data encrypted?

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#34

Post by im_dario »

In my opinion: good premise, bad conclusion. Blockchain, as good as it can be, isn't really required for social sharing.

I'm going to state pretty obvious things. We need to take a step backwards. What we need is a decentralized/federated app platform. It must run in any OS, it must allow to any actor to provide its own implementation (and their own apps - providing network effect) and it must be easy to use for the final user.

We already have some parts of this done. Facebook just took advantage that community didn't know what to do with them.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#35

Post by FlyingSnake »

ghostcluster wrote: post #20
cornholio wrote: post #5

The quintessential moat Facebook has is its strong network effect facilitated by ease of use. Facebook is simple. To the point where my elder relatives refer to Facebook as "the Internet": the place where they can see funny clips, talk to friends and share their photos and thoughts. For every person bemoaning how Facebook extended and proceeded to take a dump into her favorite aspect of the Internet - be it online pu…

I think you're downplaying the technical sophistication of Facebook, as well as the pioneering moves it made during its growth phase. Compared to MySpace, which was incumbent during its rise, Facebook did everything faster, with less friction for the everyday user. MySpace would often try and stuff full interstitial page loads between core parts of its user interface. Facebook invented photos tagged with social profi…

The technical sophistications of Facebook were indeed instrumental in it's meteoric rise. After all they were the face of 'Move fast and break things" movement. I'm not sure if blockchain is the solution to the next social platform, but the excessive hype around the term has made me sceptical about that.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#36

Post by Alex3917 »

tlb wrote: post #25
cornholio wrote: post #5

The quintessential moat Facebook has is its strong network effect facilitated by ease of use. Facebook is simple. To the point where my elder relatives refer to Facebook as "the Internet": the place where they can see funny clips, talk to friends and share their photos and thoughts. For every person bemoaning how Facebook extended and proceeded to take a dump into her favorite aspect of the Internet - be it online pu…

When people propose blockchain solutions, I always think: How would it work with just a regular database? How would a blockchain make it better? What coalition of people will run the blockchain, and why would they be more trustworthy than whoever would run the database? There are good answers to these for some applications, but I don't see what they are here.

> What coalition of people will run the blockchain, and why would they be more trustworthy than whomever would run the database?

No person or company is allowed to own more than 24.9% of a banking charter, and preferably not more than 10%. The reason is that having multiple entities each pursuing their own agenda makes it less likely that everyone will collude and run off with the money. It doesn't especially matter who those entities are, as long as they're not closely affiliated with one another.

Similarly, for whatever problems democracies have, they tend to function at least marginally better than corporate-owned countries like Rhodesia, Batavia, etc. And economically, there is a reason why currencies tend to be a better store of value over time than in-app credits or company scrip.

Personally I think creating government privacy legislation would be a much better use of time than trying to build a social network on blockchain, but I understand the thought process.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#37

Post by moultano »

allannienhuis wrote: post #15
swalsh wrote: post #8

I was thinking about this a few months ago. I stopped though because I realized most user content (well in my network at least) was photos and video. Which don't belong in a block chain. In fact if you really start to unroll the implentation, a block chain is t even required. I think we just need a common protocol. Then multiple "vendors" can host the information (encrypted so they can't read it), and multiple "vendo…

That sounds like what the folks at Mastodon are trying to do. On the surface they seem to have decent implementations. But every time I think about signing up to an instance, I realise that all the friends I care about (in the social media sense) are on Facebook. It becomes a non-starter for me. The value of Facebook is the social graph, and we put up with it's shortcomings because of that.

I bounced once I hit the friction of picking an instance. It's not something you can really join without knowing in advance who you want to talk to or what community you want to join. Like slack or discord, I'd use it to talk to a specific community that is already using it, but not to just join and see what's there, a la twitter or facebook. The flow for it goes community -> platform, rather than platform -> community which is a very different niche I think.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#39

Post by gurrone »

tlb wrote: post #25
cornholio wrote: post #5

The quintessential moat Facebook has is its strong network effect facilitated by ease of use. Facebook is simple. To the point where my elder relatives refer to Facebook as "the Internet": the place where they can see funny clips, talk to friends and share their photos and thoughts. For every person bemoaning how Facebook extended and proceeded to take a dump into her favorite aspect of the Internet - be it online pu…

When people propose blockchain solutions, I always think: How would it work with just a regular database? How would a blockchain make it better? What coalition of people will run the blockchain, and why would they be more trustworthy than whoever would run the database? There are good answers to these for some applications, but I don't see what they are here.

I would like to add: Do they understand that it's impossible to delete anything that got commited to the block chain once a block is accepted? I mean at least if they think about a blockchain in the sense of the Bitcoin blockchain. Implementing a deletion of prior blocks is an interesting problem.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#40

Post by sweeds »

tlb wrote: post #25
cornholio wrote: post #5

The quintessential moat Facebook has is its strong network effect facilitated by ease of use. Facebook is simple. To the point where my elder relatives refer to Facebook as "the Internet": the place where they can see funny clips, talk to friends and share their photos and thoughts. For every person bemoaning how Facebook extended and proceeded to take a dump into her favorite aspect of the Internet - be it online pu…

When people propose blockchain solutions, I always think: How would it work with just a regular database? How would a blockchain make it better? What coalition of people will run the blockchain, and why would they be more trustworthy than whoever would run the database? There are good answers to these for some applications, but I don't see what they are here.

The one main advantage that I'm aware of is that a distributed, decentralized database for a social network would mean that there is no one private company that gatekeeps, owns, and sells the personal data within.

For all intents and purposes, Facebook's database is closed source. The community doesn't know exactly what this private company does with this data. We have to trust them with it. A blockchain database is trustless.

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