111–120 of 356 posts
Okay Hackernews, I get it. Scuttlebutt isn't fully ready for everything yet. I wrote that article hoping that it would sparkle interest to both use it, plus make it happen. This is not your usual startup launch, it's a community project by multiple open source hackers. If something is missing, you can make it happen. And there are so many ongoing developments right now (see list below), that it really doesn't make se…
But I don't see any of these services taking over Facebook or even making a slight dent. What might happen is that Facebook dies a slow death and none of my friends keep in contact on there. But then none of us really built up and real friendships on there so there's no incentive to start again on another site.
I guess, even say we all got our wish and Facebook died, I don't see utopia running up behind it. Utopia for most geeks was probably the early days of the internet. I don't see anything bringing those back.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's my advice: You've missed the point and likely didn't do validation before building this (if you have). I don't want 1,000 features from launch. Facebook didn't start out doing everything they do today, neither should you. Copying another service won't win you users because maybe users don't like that feature or how it works. I want something that solves a problem without unnecessary doohickeys glued on to it.…
Facebook may not have started doing everything they're doing now, but they do have it now. Any new competitor is not going to be judged based on what Facebook was 10 years ago; they're going to be judged against it now.
Okay Hackernews, I get it. Scuttlebutt isn't fully ready for everything yet. I wrote that article hoping that it would sparkle interest to both use it, plus make it happen. This is not your usual startup launch, it's a community project by multiple open source hackers. If something is missing, you can make it happen. And there are so many ongoing developments right now (see list below), that it really doesn't make se…
Can you point me towards the Go implementation? I'd love to contribute.
It isn't an alternative to Facebook unless my grandma can use it, and she couldn't set this up for herself. The idea that centralized storage is the problem masks the actual concern. There is nothing inherently wrong with centrally stored data. There is a problem is when it is locked down by a 3rd party, and/or you don't control how it is used.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Huh? Scuttlebutt is fully encrypted.. doesn't that make the API vastly more locked down than Facebook/etc? > There is a clear issue with Facebook's accountability in these areas. Distributed systems are typically open source, they run on multiple servers…
It's worse than facebook because there's no one to have responsibility to be accountable. This ties in with your question about GDPR. While I'm not a lawyer, as far as I know it doesn't matter if you're a person or a company, if you're collecting data, it's something you can be liable for. So in a distributed system, all parties who maintain the data sources would be liable. I actually wonder how this works logistica…
I find this to be fundamentally wrong. After you post something on Scuttlebutt, you have no control of that data. Sure, it's stored on your computer, but it's also shared with your whole network who now have as much control of it as you have.
I'd instead put it like this:
> What makes Scuttlebutt unique is the simple idea that no one entity should control all of the users' data.
To be an alternative to facebook, it should at least do 50% of what facebook does, and it should be accessible to all.
Anything that takes more than 3 steps to get it running it's going to keep people out. And if you keep people out, you don't have a social network, at least not anything like facebook where your grandma and people you went to school with but never met (or pretend you never met) are.
Plus you need marketing, a business plan, and so much more than just code that puts people together on the same page.
I hope for a social network where the data belongs to the user, but unless you get the complication out of it... it will be just something cool but not worth the time.