61–70 of 134 posts
Just stop now and give your money to Beaker Browser https://beakerbrowser.com/
Nobody needs a social network anymore, whether it is decentralized (Mastodon, Diaspora) or centralized (Facebook, Twitter). I think the social media bubble burst a long time ago and we just didn't realize it. I also have a Mastodon account, but used it only for a short time. I speak now only for myself personally, social networks bore me quite and I have no more interest to sign up somewhere.
Nobody needs another Facebook or Twitter.
The future of humans communicating, however, is wide open. Anything that succeeds on Blockstack will not be a clone of something that already exists, but rather something novel, even something that could only exist on the platform.
I've said it before, but the closest thing to the future of social networking that I've seen is Slack: Right now, outside of its marketed purpose, it's mostly used as an extension of existing online communities or as a way for people to stay in touch after departing a company, but the way it's it's centered around distributed groups is powerful, much more so than the way groups were grafted onto the core topology of Facebook.
A successful decentralized social network will not look like Slack, either. Just as Slack drew from IRC and Facebook drew from MySpace, a new network will have to draw on all of these and more, synthesizing a new experience that offers genuine value.
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Muneeb Ali, Blockstack co-founder here. I'm a technical consultant to the Silicon Valley show (season 5) along with my co-founder Ryan. So yes there is a link to the show but the project is not based on the show :-) Blockstack was in the R&D phase until early 2017 (building the core tech & infrastructure), we launched our browser last summer and now have decentralized apps built on the platform that are live. These a…
Quick question, do you really think $100k is enough money to build a social network? If so, how much time and people is needed for such task? P.S. I'm convinced it's not enough money. It will take over a year just to have something working and usable and it will take more than 5 people to do that.
With Blockstack most of the heavy-lifting is done for you by the underlying platform (identity, auth, storage -- all three decentralized).
We've seen people build functioning chat apps and alternative to Google docs within few months. See stealthy.im and graphitedocs.com
Isn't the point of a blockchain to keep a ledger of the changes? So how can you delete anything without rebuilding the entire chain? Being decentralized in this case just means that now everyone has my data. Sure, it is encrypted, but are we just going to say what is secure today will be secure tomorrow?
My understanding of blockchain is that it is meant to be tamper proof. Which is nice for things like tracking votes or ensuring the integrity of things, but with my personal data I WANT to have the power to tamper with it. These two ideas seem to be at odds.
If I'm misunderstanding, maybe somebody can educate me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Muneeb Ali, Blockstack co-founder here. I'm a technical consultant to the Silicon Valley show (season 5) along with my co-founder Ryan. So yes there is a link to the show but the project is not based on the show :-) Blockstack was in the R&D phase until early 2017 (building the core tech & infrastructure), we launched our browser last summer and now have decentralized apps built on the platform that are live. These a…
Quick question, do you really think $100k is enough money to build a social network? If so, how much time and people is needed for such task? P.S. I'm convinced it's not enough money. It will take over a year just to have something working and usable and it will take more than 5 people to do that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody needs a social network anymore This sort of comment is why people in tech are very often seen as being incredibly bad at solving non-trivial social problems by people outside of our industry. Somewhere between a third and a half of all the people on Earth see enough value in social networks to use one regularly. There are plenty of problems with the way networks work, and what they do to our mental health, but…
> Somewhere between a third and a half of all the people on Earth see enough value in social networks to use one regularly. That's a logical fallacy. You cannot possibly interpret the reasons why people use the social networks. They very well may feel forced to use them in order to get a job or otherwise be socially accepted. You call that "value" perhaps - they use it to get a job, therefore providing value. But tha…
Yes it does, necessarily. This is basic biology, economics and self preservation. It may be temporal (i.e. good in short, bad in long) but nonetheless, people do not do things they do not value.
I think people are worrying so much about network and storage and uptime for ephemeral machines that they are missing the forest for the trees here. Just get a decent platform and iterate from there. At first, you don't have to federate, conform to a protocol, distribute data, etc. But if you are building these things, why not at least offer anonymity?
0 - https://github.com/cretz/bine 1 - https://github.com/cretz/yukup/tree/master/yukup/pb/proto
The problem is making something as engaging and entertaining and interesting as Facebook. Good luck.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Somewhere between a third and a half of all the people on Earth see enough value in social networks to use one regularly. That's a logical fallacy. You cannot possibly interpret the reasons why people use the social networks. They very well may feel forced to use them in order to get a job or otherwise be socially accepted. You call that "value" perhaps - they use it to get a job, therefore providing value. But tha…
> That they use them does not mean they derive value from them. Yes it does, necessarily. This is basic biology, economics and self preservation. It may be temporal (i.e. good in short, bad in long) but nonetheless, people do not do things they do not value.
Why use blockchain? Doesn't that actually give you less control? Isn't the point of a blockchain to keep a ledger of the changes? So how can you delete anything without rebuilding the entire chain? Being decentralized in this case just means that now everyone has my data. Sure, it is encrypted, but are we just going to say what is secure today will be secure tomorrow? My understanding of blockchain is that it is mean…
The blockchain is a really terrible medium for a social network. Maybe some kind of hybrid where the blockchain entries point/link to a centralized (or federated) location, but, then, why not just build your own protocol that doesn't use the blockchain? Just build it over Matrix or something.
What does the blockchain provide, other than a buzzword?