Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

friendi.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 146 posts

Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

#121

Post by tscs37 »

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?

Atleast on mastodon you can blacklist.

Whitelisting nodes is counterproductive to what federation is trying to achieve.

A decentralized network means that if things go sour, the cost of switching is small, similar to an email account. If my mail provider fucks up, I point my domain to another one and I don't even bother.

Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

#122

Post by chrstphrknwtn »

codyswann wrote: post #111
chrstphrknwtn wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, your whole argument seems to be based on what ill-informed people will tolerate, not was is ethical. I agree marketing is intended to manipulate your thinking... or "market towards you". I suspect I have a different attitude about marketing than you do. I don't use facebook, I used for a week in 2007, and thought "this is just a marketing data machine, no thanks". Further, the innocuous sounding "Connecting the…

I'm very well informed and I'm 100% ok with Facebook using whatever data I put on it. The fact that some people choose to remain uninformed about what Facebook is doing with the data that these people willfully give them is on those people. What is ethical in this situation is personal to you, so you can't make a blanket statement that marketing is or not ethical. Again, to me, it's perfectly ethical, but I'm a big b…

For the well informed, such as yourself, choosing to share your data knowing that it will be sold and potentially used in ways that you won't like or agree with down the track, is indeed an informed choice.

What I think is not ok, and in turn unethical, is for a company to constantly represent that privacy is a top priority, openly say in the press that data will not be sold, and then do it anyway.

Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

#123

Post by gressquel »

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…

I have a feeling none of these "decentralized" social networks are going to succeed in capturing the users, but I believe one of these will attract the users for something else than the feature "decentralized". When it happens, whoever owns the site will then move away from the initial concept and build the site around the side-effect feature that attracted the users and then capture the entire audience and thus kill facebook once and for all-.

Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

#124

Post by buovjaga »

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…

> This is yet another platform solution. The problem with platform solutions is that they still present one and only one choice of software.

Friendica supports a ton of protocols, see the "Interoperability" section on the front page.

Regarding ActivityPub, it is good to keep in mind the reality: https://github.com/friendica/friendica/issues/4688

Quoting MrPetovan:

> ActivityPub is a "loose standard", meaning that it doesn't define precisely each interaction. "Supporting ActivityPub" doesn't make any sense, because, per the standard, implementers are forced to make local decisions about how to convey specific features via ActivityPub because of an intended lack of description.

> In this context, you can claim "supporting ActivityPub" and not being able to interact with any other service also claiming "supporting ActivityPub" just because you made different implementation decisions.

> Another angle: Mastodon implemented ActivityPub for internal communication between Mastodon instances. So they designed their usage of ActivityPub according to their specific usage and features since the standard actually encourages you to do so by leaving parts intentionally vague. However, if any other project wants to communicate with Mastodon instances, they will have to know which specific decisions were made for the intentionally vague parts of the standard because you can't just guess.

> It is different from OStatus where interactions were much more precisely defined, so you actually could rely on the standard definition to implement a single connector that would mostly work with most OStatus services because the vague parts were reduced to a minimum.

Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

#125

Post by bausshf »

icc97 wrote: post #68
bausshf wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how you mention Facebook, yet Facebook moved away from traditionally PHP and made their own PHP engine and has a lot of native code in C++.

They still got all their initial scale from PHP until they were so big that it was worth writing their own PHP engine. They would have had the same problem with Python or JavaScript.

Indeed, but it's a classic example of why you shouldn't use something just because it's popular.

Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

#126

Post by eatinggrin »

darkstar999 wrote: post #120
eatinggrin wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always love the argument that PHP runs 70% of the web. Water covers 70% of earth surface, therefore I should build my house on water. http://i.imgur.com/Fp5pw9o.png

That's a horrible analogy.

Let me guess, you're a PHP developer.

Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

#127

Post by corobo »

eatinggrin wrote: post #126
darkstar999 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a horrible analogy.

Let me guess, you're a PHP developer.

At least show your working on why it's bad. Currently you're coming off as someone that's heard something is bad and repeating it without verifying

Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

#128

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

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've found FB mostly irrelevant for socialising, but very useful for interest groups - what used to be Usenet, then eGroups/Onelist, then YahooGroups, then Google (sort of.)

There are only so many possible applications in the social space, and the idea that friends/family, work colleagues, hobby/interest, and professional interest groups should all share the same space was always eccentric.

Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

#130

Post by 1812Overture »

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.

I see no way of controlling privacy in a decentralized system. It'd be like trying to delete all the emails you've sent to other people or stop someone from forwarding an email. Once you put the data out there in a decentralized system, it's out there permanently. Centralization allows for some control.
Post reply on HN