Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network • Hacker News Board

Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

#71

Post by iamnotlarry » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 1:55 PM UTC

codyswann wrote: post #32

fwdpropaganda wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"No one cares that their personal data is being sold" is a HN talking point. A lot of people care. Example: In the EU so many people care that legistators are taking measures to protect the people. Perhaps it's just the people around you that don't care...?

"A lot" of people also think the world is flat. Let's be specific here. I would say 90% or more of Facebook users couldn't care less if their data is sold to advertisers. I'm one of those people. Tell me why I should care. The same thing happens with loyalty cards at Walgreens. It's the people on Facebook that make Facebook trash, not Facebook itself. As for your "legistators" (sic), that is the faux outrage I'm talk…

I very deliberately don't participate in loyalty programs. Every single time I go through a checkout at a local business, they ask me for my loyalty info. Every single time, I decline.

Then I swipe my credit card through their machine and give them the exact same credit card number to associate with every purchase I make.

I fully understand that they can track me. I am sending the message that I don't want to be tracked. I am also sending the message that I am willing to pass on their incentives to be tracked, but I am not willing to pass on the convenience of my credit card.

Then I make my credit card company send me a new card every year. So vendors get to track me through less than 50 purchases before I switch.

For businesses that track loyalty by customer name, I will give them the name of a neighbor or other acquaintance. It's astounding how often they are willing to give me back information about that person.

Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

#72

Post by davidy123 » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 1:56 PM UTC

icc97 wrote: post #62

davidy123 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it very strange that nobody includes, y'know, Wikipedia in these kinds of conversations. Don't you think Wikipedia is more important than Facebook and Wordpress? As a person involved in mainstream Internet adoption, I consider it as important as the Internet in establishing free, participatory hypertext information. In addition to the fact people now assume they can just find something out without commercial s…

Quite right, I forgot it. But it furthers the point I think.

It furthers it for early 2000s projects for sure, a time when getting your site on a Web server was easiest with PHP and most sites didn't rely heavily on AJAX. But now most startups will start in "the cloud," using SPA designs, where PHP is not significant.

Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

#73

Post by amelius » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 2:00 PM UTC

pmlnr wrote: post #67

amelius wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emphasis should be on the requirements. What do we want the system to do? And how can we control our privacy? Let's answer these questions first.

Fair and important questions. The closest immediate answer I have is https://indieweb.org/SWAT0 but the page is quite dense with indieweb terms. EDIT: https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/federatedsocialweb/wiki/SW... might be a better source. Defining a minimum set of features for what a social network (media? web? system?) is is certainly a required step, and any suggestions are welcome.

That's a start, but I suspect we're better off thinking about all possible features, because this allows us to define a protocol that generalizes better.

In your example, users can be tagged in a photo. That's nice. But let's say that in the future we want to share who's attending what events. Perhaps we can use the same kind of constructs in the protocol for both uses.

Of course, an implementation does not need to support all features from the start.

Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

#74

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 2:05 PM UTC

kodablah wrote: post #35

> Friendica runs on PHP with MySQL as a database. If you can run WordPress, you can run Friendica. Not the biggest fan of the stack, but no problem. These networks are getting closer. Now create a desktop installer that: has its own web server + php + mysql pieces embedded and execute on their own ports on startup. (I say I don't like the stack because I'd prefer something that can all be statically compiled). Make s…

[deleted]

Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

#75

Post by einsty » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 2:05 PM UTC

Seems that the bright minds here behind friendica could be helpful in the MIT Solid project being run by Tim Berners Lee. And/or they could be a SOLID app themselves:

Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

#76

Post by LinkToTheAss » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 2:10 PM UTC

After multiple facebook breaks (and now im off for more than a year) I must say, that I dont see any usage for social media platforms anymore, that work like facebook or google plus. All this egocentric stuff is based on instagram and user created news is based on reddit or twitter. Communication is based on telegram, signal etc.

So what the hell do I need FB for? I dont need it and i dont see a reason to switch to an other social media platform like friendica or diaspora anymore. But maybe im just getting old :D

Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

#77

Post by StreamBright » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 2:18 PM UTC

rglullis wrote: post #45

hudon wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its design intended it to be used that way, but that's not how people use it. Everyone uses a centralized email provider now (Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc.), and these providers act as gatekeepers to email. If they disappear, people will find an alternative centralized messaging scheme, not start learning how to run their own mail servers...

Sorry, it is still decentralized. - Even if it were true that "everyone uses Google/Microsoft/Apple/etc", the ones that don't can still send/receive emails from everyone else. - If one of the of the big providers disappear, the system as a whole will continue to function.

I am pretty sure if Google disappeared we were going to see a huge drop in the email traffic. How would I get to know the new email address of my friend who we only talked using Gmail for example?

Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

#78

Post by zeveb » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 2:28 PM UTC

Sounds interesting, but I don't think PHP & MySQL are a good stack. While it's possible to write secure software in PHP (I'd probably trust the Paragon IE) guys to do it), it's not very likely. As for MySQL — as far as I'm concerned there is essentially no reason to choose it over PostgreSQL, and a project which does so is thus instantly suspect. If they've made an error that grave, what other errors have they made?

It'd be like someone choosing Windows as a server OS: there's a small chance it was a good decision, and a far, far greater probability that it was the result of a toxic engineering & management culture.

Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

#79

Post by kodablah » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 2:29 PM UTC

grinsekatze wrote: post #42

I think many people that are moving away from Facebook move away from social networks in general. Personally, I am not interested at all in a Facebook replacement. I gave a couple a try, but quickly realized that spending time on these social networks is even more boring than Facebook, especially if none of your friends are on there.. and therefor a total waste of my time. If I need to communicate with friends I do t…

> I think many people that are moving away from Facebook move away from social networks in general [...] If I need to communicate with friends I do this "directly" via WhatsApp or email.

I'd like to see the line disappear and I'd like to see WhatsApp or email be considered social networking. I think a well built app can have both of those features in addition to the feed+post+comment style of Facebook. From the user perspective, what are all these communication mediums but just "place" configuration?

Edit: here're some early scratch grpc services I have been toying with to abstract different communication forms: https://github.com/cretz/yukup/tree/6793fb2b281e4ea7cda1fe5b...

Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

#80

Post by Xeoncross » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 2:31 PM UTC

Thank you Friendica team! We need more work in this space!

> Friendica runs on PHP with MySQL as a database. If you can run WordPress, you can run Friendica.

This is a problem. I picture the future decentralized systems being a self-contained system that runs on your device (desktop or mobile) as well as servers for more technical people.

To this end the only scripting language that can pull this off is Javascript. Ruby and PHP are not needed or useful in this space.

To anyone that reads this, please take a couple weeks to learn Node (+electron or react-native), Go, or (hardest) Rust.