Here's a good resource for setting up self-hosted alternatives: https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted
Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize
21–30 of 174 posts
Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are now phone plans that are paid for by selling your data and sending you spam SMS. There are e-mail providers that operate similarly, and most e-mail addresses are registered with one of them. Those things don't really work for snail mail, but few people use it anymore, because sending a letter costs more and they have come to expect communication not to cost money. The formerly decentralized services are no…
Your point is valid, but we still live in a world where we can call Verizon phones with AT&T phones; send e-mails to Gmail users with Yahoo; and send mail with UPS instead of USPS. With those means of communication, we still have control over our providers. There is no control within Facebook's ecosystem. Similar with AOL, if you don't use Facebook, you're necessarily out of the loop, and I don't feel comfortable wit…
I don't think decentralization just means > 1. That you can use 4 services is not very decentralized.
Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
We already have decentralization in three primary forms of communication: phone, mail, and e-mail. They worked great in 1998. Why can't they work great in 2018?
There are now phone plans that are paid for by selling your data and sending you spam SMS. There are e-mail providers that operate similarly, and most e-mail addresses are registered with one of them. Those things don't really work for snail mail, but few people use it anymore, because sending a letter costs more and they have come to expect communication not to cost money. The formerly decentralized services are no…
>The formerly decentralized services are no longer so decentralized
People keep saying this but to my knowledge email still isn't centralized. While there are a lot of gmail users in the US but that's not the case in many other countries, many people also have a .edu email and a few years ago I ran my email server myself (I even handled signing papers when I switched jobs over it.) Google even contributed to and pushed for dkim and spf which solved a huge spam problem that threatened their ability to forward mail from smaller outside domains to their users. A lot of people might use one of the big services but as long as you don't have to in order to interact with them it's not "centralized."
Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize
#24Mastodon does everything signed and unencrypted. This includes followers-only and private messages. I can't in good faith recommend Mastodon.
All of the messages I post on Mastodon and twitter are intended to be public, just like the things I write on my website. End to end encryption would only make things harder without actually protecting anyone's privacy.
Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize
#25I see this form of argument a lot: Companies have an {obligation, fiduciary duty} to maximize value for shareholders, therefore they have no choice but to do horrible things to {users, customers, the environment, civic institutions} Presumably, decentralization, federation and open source will eliminate the profit-maximizing corporation, thereby stopping all the horrible things. The problem with this reasoning is tha…
> If every user paid $5 a month, Facebook's shareholders would do fabulously well.
> But of course, that's a ridiculous proposition. Only an infinitesimal number of Facebook's 2.2 billion users are willing to pay for the service.
Well, at least some tens of millions of users seemed to be happy about the idea to pay USD 1 a year for WhatsApp.
They were running this operation with something like 50 engineers so it should have been really profitable.
Then came Facebook...
Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize
#26Companies like Facebook, publicly traded, have a legal obligation to maximize profits for their shareholders. Private companies with investors are similarly obligated. There is no promise that a company can make to its users that outweighs the fiduciary duty that obligates them to maximize profits by any means. Not true. [1] [1] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-co...
Even if it were true, couldn’t a company argue that they want to put users before shareholders to prevent a public fallout like we are seeing with Facebook? Which could be seen as risk management.
If it were true, then there would have to exist at least some framework to judge what counts as maximizing profits. Maximizing the profit this quarter may require a vastly different course of actions than maximizing the profit over the next ten years. So depending on exactly what would fall under maximizing profits, this may or may not be a valid argument
But fortunately we don't have to worry about that, the people writing laws are not all idiots and it would be a pretty stupid idea to put requirements into laws that are essentially impossible to fulfill due to a lack of psychic powers and time machines.
Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize
#27Mastodon does everything signed and unencrypted. This includes followers-only and private messages. I can't in good faith recommend Mastodon.
Oh come on!
Twitter by default broadcasts everything you write to the entire world!
Why should open source solutions be held to a higher standard?
Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize
#28I think that these points have to click before people move from FB:
Simple -> Start the app and commicate (on all devices)
Minimum features -> Feed, Chat, Groups, Events, Friends
Fast -> No one will use a slow App
Ownership -> All self-owned data can be removed from everywhere
Decentralized -> And no one else can remove your data
Privacy -> With simple sharing control
So far, I've not seen anything that has all of these.
Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize
#29The post repeats the myth “There is no promise that a company can make to its users that outweighs the fiduciary duty that obligates them to maximize profits by any means. The only defense of this is legislation and consumer choice.”
As a counterpoint, see, for example, [1], that quotes the Supreme Court Hobby Lobby decision[2]: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”
The argument in the OP article stands without this — it is nearly as bad that companies have incentives to misbehave, as if they were legally obligated to — but there is also room for improvement at the margin, if employees and customers understand that corporate actions are management’s choice; their hands are not tied.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
[2] https://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&v...
Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize
#30I see this form of argument a lot: Companies have an {obligation, fiduciary duty} to maximize value for shareholders, therefore they have no choice but to do horrible things to {users, customers, the environment, civic institutions} Presumably, decentralization, federation and open source will eliminate the profit-maximizing corporation, thereby stopping all the horrible things. The problem with this reasoning is tha…
> If every user paid $5 a month, Facebook's shareholders would do fabulously well. > But of course, that's a ridiculous proposition. Only an infinitesimal number of Facebook's 2.2 billion users are willing to pay for the service. Well, at least some tens of millions of users seemed to be happy about the idea to pay USD 1 a year for WhatsApp. They were running this operation with something like 50 engineers so it shou…
WhatsApp without any server-side storage nor content discovery? These are primary requirements towards a social network and they'll cost more than another dollar to fulfil.