This already exists. It's called scuttlebutt and it's awesome. No coin or ICO involved, just a bunch of smart programmers solving hard problems. The best bit is you can use it with just an app, you don't need to setup your own sever or trust someone else's to host your content like every other decentralized social network I've seen.
Towards a world without Facebook
81–90 of 164 posts
Re: Towards a world without Facebook
#82Do you really want to live your days feeling dependent on this sort of "service"? Do you really want to say, "but I need Facebook!".
In today's age, you need a phone number and e-mail. It's ok - they are decentralized. Don't let a centralized platform of Facebook's evil nature become necessary for you to live your life.
Delete and forget it existed. Ignore and move on. Give up the benefits and pay the cost.
Re: Towards a world without Facebook
#83The 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 algorithm needed for Multi-Master (decentralized) data is a CRDT (Conflict-free Replicated Data Type).
Specifically, this solves the problem of data consistency across different node/peers without needing a central (ie, Facebook's servers) master.
The way it works, is like so: http://gun.js.org/distributed/matters.html
However, a blockchain is still actually useful for a P2P Facebook. A blockchain that uses a consensus algorithm (PoW, PoS, etc.) is not scalable enough, though. But that is okay, as we do not need to solve the Double Spending problem for tweets/photos (see the previous link as to why).
So what does a "blockchain" mean then? A blockchain is a cryptographically signed linked list, often a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph). But these graphs would more likely be social networking data, which is naturally a graph - and they would be signed with user's public/private key pair.
Solving for that is pretty easy, we already have it working:
http://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-wit...
And our goal is to build a social network that has distinctly different properties than Facebook, one that is based on psychological research and emotional intelligence:
https://hackernoon.com/a-new-kind-of-social-network-emotiona...
Finally, the hardest factor is to remove the complexity of cryptography. There turns out to be a good security standard that lets user emulate username/password combos (see the middle link for more details), in summary:
You use PBKDF2 to extend a user's password with a salt, this creates a Proof of Work which is used as an AES symmetric cypher key to decrypt their private key. Fully P2P, but with a traditional UI that users understand, yet PBKDF2 makes it impractical for a cracker to guess (or even a dictionary attack) against the user's account.
Re: Towards a world without Facebook
#84I 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…
The useful part of block chain is the Merkel tree, where each small piece of data is tamper proof and consistent because it hashes the data that came before it. Having all the social data on one big chain would be silly, because it would never scale.
Scuttlebutt is a protocol just like you describe and is already being used by different clients and plugins to build a distributed social network that works quite well.
Re: Towards a world without Facebook
#85The 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’m actually wondering why every decentralised solution MUST use the blockchain.
Re: Towards a world without Facebook
#86The 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…
Something with a the functionality of facebook and the commenting system of reddit would get me on board. When you get into a discussion with someone under a comment they posted on CNN you literally have to check in periodically to see if they replied and if two conversations get going on the same thread the're just layered in chronological order so things get really confusing. Facebook seems to actively discourage discourse. Just leave a comment and go away.
I also like how Mastodons feed just shows everything posted by people you're following in chronological order. I don't need a custom algorithm to decide what shows up in my feed when unless it's an algorithm of my design.
Also facebook has broken a lot of its features on mobile browsers to try and force people into installing it's apps. I don't want facebooks crappy apps on my phone so I have to force the desktop page to load to view private messages, but that breaks the website completely so I have to reload the mobile version of the site m.facebook.com while forcing desktop mode to be able to read private messages from the phone.
I would say that during it's rise to market leader facebook was the most user friendly social networking site, but the whole thing rattles and the tires are getting bald now
Re: Towards a world without Facebook
#87The fundamental problem is economic. It's not that Facebook is invulnerable or that it can't be disrupted—of course it can! The reputational risk Facebook is facing is existential, if it reaches a tipping point things could go south very quickly for them. The bigger problem is that making something like Facebook requires a lot of resources. You can't achieve that scale, feature-set and UX quality without a lot of eng…
You could have said this same argument about Wikipedia vs Encarta back in 2000.
An open source, distributed social network doesn't need many servers and can be built by volunteers, so you don't need VC funding or a monetization model. Just get everyone to host and share their content and the content of their peers.
It may be like Linux and never be fully mass market, but that's totally fine by me, I share different content with my geekier friends than with my non-technical family anyway.
Re: Towards a world without Facebook
#88The 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…
AOL had pretty much the same moat, so there is hope that Facebook can be dethroned.
Back then, there was room in the world for Facebook to dig its own decently sized moat before it had to meet AOL head to head. Nowadays, that’s harder, certainly in the West.
Because of that, I think it’s likely that, if a company manages to dethrone Facebook, it will come from China, where the government is willing to act as a kind of incubator.
So, IMO, rather than seeing Facebook dethroned, the more likely outcome is a world with two (or maybe three? Europe seems not concerned about being part of the Facebook camp ?yet?, but it, Russia or Arab countries may at some time start helping a large local competitor emerge) giants that split the world geographically, and can’t merge because countries will forbid them from doing that.
Re: Towards a world without Facebook
#89The 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…
there s the issue of content moderation. Facebook is considered generally safe enough that people post their photos without thinking they ll be placed next to nudes.
Re: Towards a world without Facebook
#90This already exists. It's called scuttlebutt and it's awesome. No coin or ICO involved, just a bunch of smart programmers solving hard problems. The best bit is you can use it with just an app, you don't need to setup your own sever or trust someone else's to host your content like every other decentralized social network I've seen.
From what I see, last commit was a year ago and that was just to bump the version number. Is more work being done on this? It looks interesting.
edit never mind, I was looking at https://github.com/dominictarr/scuttlebutt