Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

But this sounds like the old proprietary vs open source arguments. 1. The biggest tech companies in the world have struggled to keep up with the pace of innovation in open source. 2. Scale of userbase counts but standards facilitate this by creating a network and market. 3. There is a compelling business case for having an ownership stake in your tech platform which revolves around roadmap, security, and longevity. Longevity is counterintuitive but FB can bite the dust like Myspace, and Google can go the way of Woolworths. Huge institutional brands can evaporate fast and barely leave a trace; many young people today have never heard of Madonna, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, unthinkable to older generations.

The way to differentiate on standards is via features and service, which gmail does well (spam was the killer feature which got most using it). But just lately Google has started looking at proprietary extensions to web and mail, and it's like Microsoft in the early web all over again. We saw how that turned out, even though it was unthinkable that MS wouldn't "win the web" at the time by their sheer scale, brand recognition, and a market share which amounted to a de facto monopoly.

(And funnily enough, Google seems to make the same product mistakes as MS, where it tries to boil the ocean in an orgy of featuritis. With a subset of the tech behind Wave they could have made a great competitor to Wechat/Line etc. Look at Slack - it costs around the same, possibly more than, Office 365 or Google Apps for Business, yet does a tiny fraction. Everybody knows Slack's only real differentiator is UX and service e.g. not having to run chat servers, bouncers, search etc. Again Google could have pieced a lot of Slack together from existing components in Wave. Feels like they are very shaky when it comes to executing product and it could be their undoing.)

True, and this is a solved problem in the fediverse. Mastodon dev team have been particularly good at implementing filtering tools at both the user and instance level (like the email filters that block whole domains used only for spam or other abuse).

We've had a couple of waves of folks banned from the birdsite turn up, get asked to set up their own instances, and after a while, you just stop noticing they're there. It's like a normal after-work drinks pub and a skinhead bar being in the same street. You occasionally walk past some unsavoury characters, but you don't have to interact with them.

> Facebook is sometimes famously called out for creating those filters.

No, what FarceBook and goOgle (among others) are called out for is creating echo chambers, not filters. The difference is subtle but crucial. In a nutshell, filters allow you to mute people who abuse you; spamming, flooding, flaming, dogpiling, sea-lioning, all the old favourites from UseNet/ mailing lists and a few new ones. Echo chambers quietly disappear the opinions of people who may disagree with you, however politely, and regardless of how many peer-reviewed citations they offer. You don't even know its happening, leading to dangerous levels of false consciousness, and uncritical partisanship.

Friendi.ca and Hubzilla can already interoperate with Diaspora using the Diaspora protocol. Here's a good guide to the current landscape of free code, federated social networks here, and which protocols each app supports: https://medium.com/we-distribute/a-quick-guide-to-the-free-n...