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serious question: how does this work for something like Facebook? Things like Facebook and Twitter don't work well in a decentralised fashion (Does Lady Gaga need to be able to deal with 4 million concurrent connections for all her followers?).
An email server doesn't need concurrent connections to every possible recipient.
I created Servant (https://www.servant.co) as different expression of these themes, with an emphasis on convenience, as well as user and developer experience.
- A Servant hosts your data separately from the apps you use in the cloud. (Centralized, but there is more to it...)
- You can connect your Servant via Oauth2 to share your data with any app.
- The data is kept in fixed formats to promote using the same data across multiple applications – https://github.com/servant-app/json-archetypes
- You pay Servant by purchasing API Requests to transmit data. Your fees are passed through Servant to the developers of the apps that put your data to use via API Tracking on Servant's end.
– Further, apps get access to users' credit card information and can charge users without needing to prompt them for payment information.
– And much more...
My skype ID: austencollins
serious question: how does this work for something like Facebook? Things like Facebook and Twitter don't work well in a decentralised fashion (Does Lady Gaga need to be able to deal with 4 million concurrent connections for all her followers?).
Want to follow Lady GAGA? Just subscribe to a mailing list.
Some of the mechanisms of Twitter, Google Plus and Facebook can easily be mapped to an email like protocol. Friend requests correspond to whitelisting or a special filter on the mails you receive, same goes for "Circles". Hashtags would similarly correspond to potentially dynamic mailing lists, that could be hosted by basically anyone and indexed by a separate service.
To publish something on "your wall" just send an email to a mailing list you control, to make a post "private" just encrypt it using the public key of your indented recipients, etc.
The problem with todays services is that they don't rely on a publicly defined protocol and essentially dumb if somewhat elaborate implementation of that protocol, but instead offer a public "open" API to a service that is proprietary.
Also too many people are probably caught up in thinking about the web only in terms of http and neglect to think about the possibilities of services that don't fit neatly in that framework. Especially convenient save encryption is not implementable in the browser without plugins at the moment, as far as I can see.
serious question: how does this work for something like Facebook? Things like Facebook and Twitter don't work well in a decentralised fashion (Does Lady Gaga need to be able to deal with 4 million concurrent connections for all her followers?).
They would work but they are more difficult to build. Unfortunately noone has an incentive to put the amount of resources towards public infrastructure that Facebook & co do, therefore it stays centralized.
Needless to say, it's harder than you've stated.