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Towards a world without Facebook

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Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#121

Post by stordoff »

jasonkostempski wrote: post #32

"wherein users own their own data, encrypted by them, stored in the location of their choice, shared only as and when they explicitly approve" I'm probably a little late to the party but I just now realized this is exactly DRM for the individual. I don't want anything with DRM and I don't want to impose DRM on anyone else. I dont see how one could be against DRM and for this.

The implementation may be similar, and arguably the term DRM could apply, but I imagine that a key difference is that DRM (in general) controls how a content recipient can use the content (e.g. I can't modify it, or I'm limited in what programs can open the file). Here, the goal is (presumably) to control who receives access to the content, but not imposing restrictions on people who do receive it.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#122

Post by phoneboy »

tsunamifury wrote: post #72
bognition wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't achieve that scale, feature-set and UX quality without a lot of engineering manpower. I'm not sure thats true. At the time of their acquisitions Instagram had 13 employees and WhatsApp had 55. Both of those are extremely small when compared to the size of Facebook. And given the size of the acquisition price tags i'd wager facebook felt like both were existential threats.

Both raised millions before being acquired, and likely would need to raise 100s of millions to start today. Facebooks has reached both network effect and economy of scale which is very hard to unseat.

Not really a problem though is it. Compare with DASHs DAO that spend around 30M$ a year on improving and building the system.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#123

Post by ReverseCold »

sumeno wrote: post #66
ReverseCold wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The blockchain can just be used to do PKI. People having cryptocurrency wallets installed means they have a private key, and when people have private keys you can do a whole lot of cool stuff. My blockchain/IoT startup[0] primarily uses the blockchain as just that, a backend for PKI. [0]: https://ethyl.io/

Why does the average Facebook user care?

They don't.

GP said they had a hard time understanding what the use of a blockchain in social networks would be.

I was trying to get at the point that blockchain being ubiquitous leads to people having private keys which would enable an end to end encrypted social network.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#124

Post by detaro »

ReverseCold wrote: post #56
cornholio wrote: post #5

The quintessential moat Facebook has is its strong network effect facilitated by ease of use. Facebook is simple. To the point where my elder relatives refer to Facebook as "the Internet": the place where they can see funny clips, talk to friends and share their photos and thoughts. For every person bemoaning how Facebook extended and proceeded to take a dump into her favorite aspect of the Internet - be it online pu…

The blockchain can just be used to do PKI. People having cryptocurrency wallets installed means they have a private key, and when people have private keys you can do a whole lot of cool stuff. My blockchain/IoT startup[0] primarily uses the blockchain as just that, a backend for PKI. [0]: https://ethyl.io/

Why not just give people private keys? Why attach them to a blockchain?

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#125

Post by Moru »

gurrone wrote: post #39
tlb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people propose blockchain solutions, I always think: How would it work with just a regular database? How would a blockchain make it better? What coalition of people will run the blockchain, and why would they be more trustworthy than whoever would run the database? There are good answers to these for some applications, but I don't see what they are here.

I would like to add: Do they understand that it's impossible to delete anything that got commited to the block chain once a block is accepted? I mean at least if they think about a blockchain in the sense of the Bitcoin blockchain. Implementing a deletion of prior blocks is an interesting problem.

I expect that is exactly the point, no more "censoring overlords" :-)

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#126

Post by vlunkr »

kromem wrote: post #119
gurrone wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to add: Do they understand that it's impossible to delete anything that got commited to the block chain once a block is accepted? I mean at least if they think about a blockchain in the sense of the Bitcoin blockchain. Implementing a deletion of prior blocks is an interesting problem.

You can absolutely delete. You just append data that represents a delete, and the client doesn't show that item or shows it as deleted. Yes, it doesn't remove that data from the chain and a client could easily end up undoing deletes, but if you think that server based deletes actually remove the data, you might be in for an unpleasant surprise depending on the servers in question.

In the case of social media, this isnt enough. Certainly someone will create a client that shows you everything that’s been deleted. Can you imagine if you had used social media since you were a pre-teen and every bit of it was public record? I’m sure no one would use that service.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#127

Post by _lbaq »

cornholio wrote: post #5

The quintessential moat Facebook has is its strong network effect facilitated by ease of use. Facebook is simple. To the point where my elder relatives refer to Facebook as "the Internet": the place where they can see funny clips, talk to friends and share their photos and thoughts. For every person bemoaning how Facebook extended and proceeded to take a dump into her favorite aspect of the Internet - be it online pu…

The network effect works both ways, which many online games and services have discovered. I think Facebook will be replaced with something more local, closer to you, less invasive.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#128

Post by dane-pgp »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #71

I think the way forward is to embrace ActivityPub and similar endeavours. I'm not sure how much of Diaspora wound up on ActivityPub[0] / ActivitySteams[1] but I feel as though the best path forward for projects like Diaspora is to reach out to W3C to see what could be standardized. ActivityPub I believe gives us enough metadata to have enough of a social site. Although it all started from GNUSocial (or whatever it wa…

If we can get some good examples of social networking sites interoperating with each other using W3C standards like the ones you mention, then things will get very interesting with the introduction of the GDPR in Europe. Specifically, it includes a right to data portability, with the wording:

"In exercising his or her right to data portability pursuant to paragraph 1, the data subject shall have the right to have the personal data transmitted directly from one controller to another, where technically feasible."

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/

Conceivably, a Facebook user could demand that Facebook support automatically sending their Facebook posts to their friends on third party social networks. I imagine that an EU court would not be very sympathetic to Facebook claiming that it isn't technically feasible for a (large, monopolistic, American) company to support this use case when small open source (European?) competitors have implemented the W3C standards with no trouble.

Once Facebook is forced by the GDPR to publish data to competing sites, I imagine it will feel compelled to also support receiving data from people on those sites, otherwise the one-way flow of data would put Facebook users at a disadvantage. But then there is basically no reason to use Facebook, as users of competing sites would still be able to see and be seen by their friends on Facebook.

This is such a disastrous outcome for Facebook that I wouldn't be surprised if lawyers at Google (or some other big company) were already working on the legal complaints they are going to launch come May, when the GDPR comes into force.

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#129

Post by avip »

whataretensors wrote: post #103
tlb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people propose blockchain solutions, I always think: How would it work with just a regular database? How would a blockchain make it better? What coalition of people will run the blockchain, and why would they be more trustworthy than whoever would run the database? There are good answers to these for some applications, but I don't see what they are here.

> How would it work with just a regular database? You'd set up another centralized honey pot that these psychopaths actively look for. > How would a blockchain make it better? Besides censorship protection, the platform could reward users to make itself better. Lots of things become possible when you have control over the reward system and don't just extract the value to the top. > What coalition of people will run t…

"Any sufficiently uncensored user-content platform is indistinguishable from a porn site"

Re: Towards a world without Facebook

#130

Post by _glass »

I guess an art collective could really be a group of people who can actually use some kind of decentralized social network. Especially in countries where there is censorship. So a decentralized network and some kind of control over what you post (like high quality pictures of artworks, and the copyright is really unbreakable). On top of the needs of an artist from a capitalist standpoint (need to protect your product, the artwork) there is the ideological-political one. Most artists I know are very political and leaning towards solutions that are liberal and are implemented despite of governmental agencies as well as big corporations.
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