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You won't find FSF on Facebook

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Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#111

Post by statictype »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #109
statictype wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strawman. There's no technical reason why a decentralized system can't work. The main road blocks would be finding a compelling reason for people to switch away to one in the first place. Email is decentralized. It seems to have worked pretty darn well.

Email is just as much a strawman. Compare how simple email is to all of the features Facebook provides (and don't forget your ability to click on your cows in Farmville). You say there are no technical reasons why it can't work. That is very akin to the "You can do anything, it's just a simple matter of coding." The reality is that some problems become intractable due to their complexity. Distributed social network m…

Just to clarify, when I said 'technical reason' I meant from the perspective of a user being able to setup/configure their social network settings. Not from the perspective of the internal implementation of the server components

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#112

Post by __david__ »

jwwest wrote: post #76
michaelchisari wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People aren't going to run their own server. Why do people keep repeating this fallacy? People won't have to. None of these projects are focused on single-user P2P approach. For all of 30 seconds, Diaspora insinuated that, but that was before they had actually written any code. If you feel these projects (including mine) is a joke, I'd love to hear feedback why, but please don't repeat falsehoods about how the softwa…

Simplicity mostly. People want to be abstracted away from the nitty gritty details. Open ID failed because you couldn't explain it to your grandmother. But you can explain, "oh yeah, you can just click this button and login with your facebook account" Maybe this is just marketing. If individuals don't run their own server and hold control of their own data, then who does? Whoever is running the node. I know as nerds,…

> Open ID failed because you couldn't explain it to your grandmother.

Counter example: XMPP/Jabber. People who use Jabber can talk to each other with no problems. Including Google Talk, which is a huge use base. I regularly talk to friends on Google Talk with my account on my local server.

Another large counter example: SMTP. Put someone's address in your email program and it just works. Plenty of people run their own email server, despite them being notoriously complicated to set up.

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#113

Post by code_duck »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #94
code_duck wrote: post #43

>"He has created a network that is first and foremost a gold mine for government surveillance and advertisers." It would be nice for more people to realize this. Really, they're lining up like sheep for government monitoring, and Zuckerberg and Co. are happy to comply. FB seems thrilled with the prospect of being the eyes and ears of Big Brother, actually.

What evidence do you have?

I'm not saying Facebook employees or executives would literally take pleasure in enabling government surveillance, if that's what you're asking for evidence about.

Recently Twitter was the only large internet company of several to challenge a government request for data. We rarely hear about Facebook, Google, Yahoo or really anyone refusing requests for data, while at the same time there have been reports about the vast amount of requests the FBI and other agencies have made under the Patriot Act. The depth and type of information that Facebook has about so many individuals must be highly desirable to many agencies.

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#114

Post by hasenj »

statictype wrote: post #102
hasenj wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is this what FSF has become? What do you mean? This is what FSF has always been like. They're shockingly zealots in defending absolute gpl-style freedom over all your digital goods. In all honesty I don't think a decentralized and "Free" facebook would work. The centralization is a feature that most people want; it's part of why it "just work" without you having to become a system (or a network) administrator. Imag…

Strawman. There's no technical reason why a decentralized system can't work. The main road blocks would be finding a compelling reason for people to switch away to one in the first place. Email is decentralized. It seems to have worked pretty darn well.

Email works because everyone uses a web-based email, namely one of three: gmail, hotmail, yahoo.

The end result is the same: a few BigCompanies have access to alot of your data.

I think most people here on HN use gmail (but I could be wrong).

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#115

Post by statictype »

hasenj wrote: post #114
statictype wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strawman. There's no technical reason why a decentralized system can't work. The main road blocks would be finding a compelling reason for people to switch away to one in the first place. Email is decentralized. It seems to have worked pretty darn well.

Email works because everyone uses a web-based email, namely one of three: gmail, hotmail, yahoo. The end result is the same: a few BigCompanies have access to alot of your data. I think most people here on HN use gmail (but I could be wrong).

Most people do. Not all. The point being that you could choose to roll your own if you wanted to.

I bet many people on HN have their own domain and their own mail server. Hell, for a few dollars a month you can get a web hosting company to set it up for you.

For those who care about those things, they can do that and still be able to communicate with people who use gmail or yahoo mail.

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#116

Post by hasenj »

trotsky wrote: post #46
hasenj wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is this what FSF has become? What do you mean? This is what FSF has always been like. They're shockingly zealots in defending absolute gpl-style freedom over all your digital goods. In all honesty I don't think a decentralized and "Free" facebook would work. The centralization is a feature that most people want; it's part of why it "just work" without you having to become a system (or a network) administrator. Imag…

Seems like a pretty misguided point of view. Something tells me a sizable amount of the facebook crowd is comfortable downloading torrents, I'm pretty sure that counts as distributed/decentralized. As far as free software, is your mom unable to use any website that uses apache, ngix, php or ruby? Almost everyone has a broadband router that is almost entirely open source. My Mom and Dad both use an open source browser…

Bittorrent is different. You don't care who the other nodes are, all you care about is you're connected to some nodes, and the client takes care of that for you.

Like others said, the only way a decentralized facebook would work is when everyone uses one (or two) central nodes (site) which will most likely be run by something like Google or Microsoft, and the end result will be the same: big company has access to all your data.

The "Like" button probably wouldn't work though. If you're some external website, which "like" button will you embed? Google's like button? or Microsoft's?

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#117

Post by chalst »

jedsmith wrote: post #31
ryanto wrote: post #4

This article is a joke, it's something I would expect to find on some tech/news gossip website. Is this what FSF has become? > so many sites — including TIME — use Facebook's user-tracking "Like" button, Zuckerberg is able to collect information about people who aren't even users of his site. These are precedents which hurt our ability to freely connect with each other. He has created a network that is first and fore…

> Is this what FSF has become? You mean there was a time when FSF didn't launch ideological arguments to demand that people use software from the GNU Project? I'm not picking a side, just pointing out that this is par for the course. If it isn't GPL, it's evil.

They've encouraged developers to use GPL, but they've never said it was bad to use BSD/Apache-licensed software. Their website uses the BSD-licensed nginx.

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#118

Post by redthrowaway »

jrockway wrote: post #68
code_duck wrote: post #43

>"He has created a network that is first and foremost a gold mine for government surveillance and advertisers." It would be nice for more people to realize this. Really, they're lining up like sheep for government monitoring, and Zuckerberg and Co. are happy to comply. FB seems thrilled with the prospect of being the eyes and ears of Big Brother, actually.

As we've learned from the whole HBGary Federal thing, there is plenty of money to be made in doing the government's dirty work.

Except they didn't make any money, which is the sad irony of the whole situation. Yes, there are likely many others out there willing to do the work, but the fact that H&W, a DoJ-recommended firm, turned to HBGary et al, who didn't have any real experience doing what they said they could, suggests that this isn't something the gov't is doing regularly...yet.

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#119

Post by loup-vaillant »

ubernostrum wrote: post #81
michaelchisari wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a developer of a decentralized social networking project (Appleseed), I think you have a misconception of how these projects work. Your mother will never have to manage any of that stuff. She'll just log in to socialsite.com and interact with your aunt, who's on othersite.org. If there's an issue with communication between them, the administrators of respective sites will deal with them. Your mom won't notice it a…

Your mother will never have to manage any of that stuff. She'll just log in to socialsite.com and interact with your aunt, who's on othersite.org. As I said when Diaspora first started making headlines, this is incorrect. Both your mother and your aunt would be signing in to (name of decentralized social service).google.com, just like everybody else except for a handful of geeks who take pride in running their own no…

You are assuming that a usable FreedomBox¹ cannot exist. I don't believe that. Debian, Ubuntu, Firefox… demonstrate this is feasible. And there's even less of a UI problem: it'll all go through HTTP.

Imagine a plug&play thingy, which you configure by subscribing to one and only one online-looking service. One subscription for e-mail, instant messaging, Blog, "social" thing, and more. No ads, private infos at home, encryption everywhere, no need to trust any big corporation, reliable automatic backup…

Even my mom would want that.

[1]: http://freedomboxfoundation.org/

Re: You won't find FSF on Facebook

#120

Post by pak »

_ouxp wrote: post #11
ryanto wrote: post #4

This article is a joke, it's something I would expect to find on some tech/news gossip website. Is this what FSF has become? > so many sites — including TIME — use Facebook's user-tracking "Like" button, Zuckerberg is able to collect information about people who aren't even users of his site. These are precedents which hurt our ability to freely connect with each other. He has created a network that is first and fore…

Facebook could (and probably does) collect the data necessary to track people around the web, whether or not they click on 'like buttons'. Whether other sites, like Google, can do this too, is immaterial. When people are logged into Facebook, an ever increasing slice of their browsing history can be logged and tied to their real identity. Almost none of the people I know who aren't hackers have any awareness of this.

Handy Chrome extension that blocks Like buttons and their ilk:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ejpepffjfmamnamb...

I've been using it for months... no regrets. And the web is generally faster because Facebook JS takes ages to load.

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