Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

I think it's fascinating to see distributed social networks from a tech perspective. From what I've seen so far they exacerbate the problems that Facebook has been seeing so much backlash against.

1. The whole Cambridge Analytica issue was caused by APIs that are too open. For distributed systems there are more ways to exploit the APIs and gather data on users.

2. There is a clear issue with Facebook's accountability in these areas. Distributed systems are typically open source, they run on multiple servers by different owners, this leads to zero accountability.

3. GDPR compliance about deleting data is almost impossible in a distributed system.

4. Some of the problems with Facebook are more about usability and clarifying how things work to users. For instance the scandal with people giving away access to their private messages. Open source software and distributed software tends to be much harder to use.

5. Any future concern/issue will be much harder to resolve if there are thousands of different instance running decentralized social networks.

6. Using AI to detect abusive content or spot fake news is much harder if you only have a subset of the data. So it becomes harder to address those concerns in a distributed setting.

So while I think this stuff is awesome from a tech perspective, in many ways it just makes these problems harder to solve.

It's an open source alternative to FB, which makes this a more efficient FB. You are very correct on all points.

Google and others operating a crawler would have the same data as FB has today.

Your concern about APIs in distributed systems seems to neglect the fact that cryptography can be used to ensure that only the right people have access to the data.

Although I do agree on the fake news point you make.

Edit: It seems that scuttlebutt does support optional end-to-end encryption: https://github.com/ssbc/secure-scuttlebutt#security-properti...

> There is nothing inherently wrong with centrally stored data.

I'd argue that a 3rd party having the personal details and communication logs of 2 billion people is a massive problem. Privacy, governmental data requests, accidental information leakages, profiling, job applicant scrutiny, fake news, spam, data misuse by employees etc. Or even worse, in times of war.

If I may, a decentralized alternative to facebook would be community-based, allow people to do group chats, discover and post events, see attendees, meet each other, add each other to contacts, maybe even drive each other to the events, date, book group reservations at local businesses etc.

Like this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI

Yes that’s my project. Would love to get feedback.

(The things I mentioned above are actually social things, the main thing that distinguishes them is that they are taking place in the future and group collaboration online is always leading to a goal. Anything that doesn’t satisfy those two criteria is more about socializing online than offline.)