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Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

drewdevault.com

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Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#61

Post by danbruc »

Barrin92 wrote: post #59
danbruc wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they could just make users pay for the service, there is nothing that forces them to collect money from them via the indirect route of ads.

Obviously only my personal intuition but I'd wager there's not much of a business in a pay-to-play social network. My FB account is practically on hiatus already and I'd not pay for it. If there would be so much value in a privacy conscious, paid social network that is mass-consumer facing we'd probably have seen it by now.

According to Wikipedia [1] Facebook has a revenue of $40 billion with 2.2 billion monthly active users which translates to pretty much exactly $1.50 per month and user. I would be happy to pay this amount of money if it would ensure that Facebook would not try to do an nasty things with my data.

But I also think that Facebook is already on its way down, people seem to have moved on. At least according to their numbers they still seem to grow or at least remain stable but I would guess that this is mostly due to expansion into new markets and if people there go through a similar trajectory it is only a question of time until the last new market starts and eventually stops using Facebook.

Here in Germany MeinVZ [2] was the dominant social network until people started moving to Facebook and now MeinVZ is just a ghost town. And it pretty much feels the same with Facebook now, actually already for the last five or so years, people come back and engage more and more infrequently until they eventually disappear. It is much slower as compared to MeinVZ but I am pretty sure it is essentially the same thing.

I am not sure where they are all going, maybe Instagram for the younger generation, maybe just WhatsApp for friends in my age, so Facebook the company might just be fine for some more time even if Facebook the network dies. But things have certainly changed from this madness of, I don't know, somewhere between five and ten years ago, when Facebook became inevitable, when it was constantly in thew news, when every ad poster featured a Facebook link.

I would neither be surprised if it turned out that Facebook was an essentially quite short-lived onetime phenomenon and people were not that interested in a global community as the social media proponents would want you to believe, nor would I be surprised if every generation had its own Facebook even if just to set themselves apart from the older generation. Why would we even assume that social media is more than a fluke and does not die away just like many things before?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook

[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeinVZ

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#62

Post by redthrow »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #31
kpcyrd wrote: post #4

Decentralization is mostly about power distribution, it doesn't imply privacy. There are a couple of decentralized projects that are worse for privacy (for the sake of decentralization) and ended up being used for OSINT.

I don't imply it's about privacy. I talk entirely about power distribution in this article.

Do people who run the centralised, private Signal app have more power over the user than people who run decentralised, non-private Mastodon instances?

Or do Mastodon people say it's strictly for broadcasting and encourage people to use proper end-to-end encrypted messaging apps for private communication?

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#63

Post by AlphaWeaver »

kodablah wrote: post #57
thewarrior wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also : - Handle DMCA notices and law enforcement requests for taking down illegal content. - Hackers compromising accounts. - Private data being compromised because of Wordpress like security bugs. - Spam / Bots spreading junk and fake news. - Permanently deleting content. - Concerns around terrorism, grooming, child pornography etc These problems will become major headaches at scale.

I'm not sure many people require those to move from FB.

No, but some of these may be legally required in order to operate as a competitor to Facebook.

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#64

Post by danielrhodes »

This article like so many others perpetuates this idea that Facebook and others are selling your data. You can more or less disprove they are doing this with a little critical thought.

Facebook has a disincentive to sell data: if they sold user data, they no longer have exclusive control over it and somebody else can profit off their efforts in its collection. The value of Facebook is they have lots of eyeballs and they have lots of data on what those eyeballs like to see. If they simply sold this to an advertiser, why would the advertiser want to come back and pay them in the future? What they actually do is let advertisers target on this data, but the advertisers never actually have direct access - they can only assume that the users they target are ones that have the attributes they requested.

So what is Facebook selling? The same thing any other media platform, from newspapers to TV, is selling: your attention. Are you the product? Kind of. But just like any other marketplace, Facebook knows that if their platform doesn't provide value you're not going to come back and then neither will the advertisers.

Personally I think Google has played this balance far worse, by comparison: their interaction time with their users is so small that they have gotten more and more spammy to wedge into the little bit of your attention they get. Facebook gets a lot of user time and thus can be far more judicious on when and how they show you advertisements.

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#65

Post by sjg007 »

danielrhodes wrote: post #64

This article like so many others perpetuates this idea that Facebook and others are selling your data. You can more or less disprove they are doing this with a little critical thought. Facebook has a disincentive to sell data: if they sold user data, they no longer have exclusive control over it and somebody else can profit off their efforts in its collection. The value of Facebook is they have lots of eyeballs and t…

Well the advertiser needs to reach the customer so that’s why they would come back to the platform.

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#66

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

kodablah wrote: post #22
AHMagic wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While true, I think it is important to emphasize the difference between 4 platforms and 4 carriers. With both postal mail and email, its not just that there are alternative systems, but rather that you as the sender can choose any of the offerings to reach anyone, even if they use a different carrier for their own needs, so there is a lot more competitive pressure on those 4 carriers than with 4 platforms where network effects keep people locked in.

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#67

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

kodablah wrote: post #20
AHMagic wrote: post #3

Earlier 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?

> We already have decentralization in three primary forms of communication: phone, mail, and e-mail. I disagree that we currently do. And only agree for email in 1998 when its decentralized nature costed more to the users than the benefit of being decentralized, hence the transition.

That's only true if you ignore the long-term externalities of centralization.

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#68

Post by HIPisTheAnswer »

Grep'd the articles and the comments (thus far) and I'm amazed that nobody has mentioned matrix,

Check it out - matrix.org

PS: Even more importantly, the Host Identity Protocol. The US army has been using it for over 10 years. If that doesnt speak volumes ...

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#69

Post by [deleted] »

toolz wrote: post #60
rixrax wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Decentralized -> And no one else can remove your data So here's the rub: 1) you post stupid stuff, but by the time you realize this, you've already forgotten your password and the account recovery doesn't work, 2) someone gets hold of your account, posts stupid stuff, and 'throws away any means to recover the account', 3) someone posts stupid stuff that is determined to violate law, how do you take that down?

It's decentralized so the only person who should be accountable is the poster. if they mess up that's on them and no one else. Who would the state prosecute if not the poster?

[deleted]

Re: Achtung: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize

#70

Post by zestyping »

tmikaeld wrote: post #28

I 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 th…

"Migrate effortlessly off of Facebook" is arguably more important than any of those.

This is where Google+ and all the others failed.

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