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Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

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Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

#81

Post by kodablah »

amelius wrote: post #65
pmlnr wrote: post #55

This is yet another platform solution. The problem with platform solutions is that they still present one and only one choice of software. Decentralized systems can only take off if they are built around standardized protocols - this is why email works. The choice of smtp servers to run, email clients to choose from, that's what's making it resilient. Ideas like ActivityPub, webmentions, microsub, micropub, while not…

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.

Yup, I'd rather see an abstraction extracted from a solid system than created eagerly. There may be a first mover advantage to the "winner", but it's better than attempting to conform to a mostly unused protocol only to find each app adds on to it in their own ways because their feature set is larger than the protocol.

Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

#82

Post by beagle3 »

iamnotlarry wrote: post #71
codyswann wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 trac…

PCI compliance requires, among other things, that a credit card not be used to correlate purchases through time - that’s the main reason loyalty clubs exist; that’s your tracking identifier.

Whether or not this Requirement is observed, audited or enforced I have no idea.

Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

#83

Post by Joeboy »

amelius wrote: post #38
tscs37 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to trust your node admin and the admin of any node you talk to (ie your friend's node)

Obviously, I have no control over what nodes my friends are using. Can I whitelist/blacklist nodes? And how is the situation we're arriving at better than having a single party, in this case Facebook, who is to blame when things go sour?

From a personal privacy point of view it seems significantly worse to me, but I guess the positive spin would be that there isn't a single party that can simultaneously blackmail / breach the privacy of a billion people. Although my counter spin would be that in the event of one of these decentralized things going mainstream, a large player would end up being what gmail is for email.

Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

#84

Post by pmlnr »

amelius wrote: post #73
pmlnr wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

There's a list of features documented for :

https://indieweb.org/Facebook#Features

https://indieweb.org/Twitter#Features

However, I don't think there's any kind of standard-ish list for what's a minimum feature set for a social network. Please feel free to add one to the indieweb wiki, as any help is welcome.

Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

#85

Post by darkstar999 »

Xeoncross wrote: post #80

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.…

In what way is installing and running node different than installing and running PHP or any other?

Anything that ran like this would have to be contanerized anyway, meaning literally any stack would work.

Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

#87

Post by paulie_a »

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 completely agree with you, personally I am burned out by social networking. Snapchat, LinkedIn, Instagram are all gone, Facebook I barely use anymore. They offer so little and come with huge costs.

Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

#88

Post by mercer »

kodablah wrote: post #70
pmlnr wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're more or less describing https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork

Sure. If I were to give feedback, I'd say it needs a better landing and a user guide for the app (as opposed to the protocol inundated with dev jargon). Not really gonna send my mother a GitHub releases page; she needs to be the intended audience. I guess I could send her http://dinosaur.is/patchwork-downloader/ and ask her to read https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/getting-started.html and/or https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/#qui…

Agreed. I'll add that my main issue with Patchwork is that from what I can tell it's pretty much impossible to develop for it without using Node.js. I really think that for this to take off, it needs to focus on 'developer happiness' right now. There's a solid client, a relatively vibrant and activist community, but too little in the way of (relatively) inexperienced devs like myself to build apps on top of.

this is especially problematic because the Patchwork client, while impressive, is not something I enjoy using. I'm just itching to build my own alternative clients, as well as apps that run on the SSB protocol, but I can't unless I force myself to get back into the Node ecosystem.

Another crucial issue, I find, is the inability to have multiple devices linked (by whatever means) to the same user. The impression I get is that the community is split on either fixing that, or adding more tools to deal with community management. I find that worrying because I've had multiple experiences with communities where ~50% was overly focused on 'preserving what is', and none of those experiences ended up in any kind of success.

For the time being I'm still excited about Patchwork, and looking for ways to positively contribute (contrary to this post), but I get too much of a 'sixties imploding commune' vibe to feel comfortable wasting my energy, for now.

EDIT: all this sounds somewhat negative, and my apologies for that. But I got and am really excited about the core proposition of the whole thing and just worry a lot about its viability. I'd really love to hear where I'm wrong, or how I could contribute without having to deal with the community kerfuffles that I am not too interested in. It's like CouchSurfing in reverse.

Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

#89

Post by samirillian »

pmlnr wrote: post #55

This is yet another platform solution. The problem with platform solutions is that they still present one and only one choice of software. Decentralized systems can only take off if they are built around standardized protocols - this is why email works. The choice of smtp servers to run, email clients to choose from, that's what's making it resilient. Ideas like ActivityPub, webmentions, microsub, micropub, while not…

It says it uses free software and free protocols? Wonder what that means.

Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

#90

Post by Double_a_92 »

d3ckard wrote: post #33

I don't know about others, but I don't care if my social media platform is centralized or not. I use FB mainly as news feed(I don't even get that many friends' posts), but I can easily migrate that. What I need is nothing more that somehow fancy address book. FB gives me a way to contact people I don't keep strong relationships with, it lets me organize an event with those people relatively pain-free and it allows me…

> I use FB mainly as news feed

How did you manage to do that?

My feed it full of crap like: Silly memes in local languages, Weird shared videos of something cute or funny, Ads, Game invites, Photos from people I don't really know...

I basically only have facebook to kinda keep the contact data of old school friends. I don't even talk to them.

(And for dating. Contacting people unsolicitedly but still in a friendly and respectful way works much better than going on online dating sites...)

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