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Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook

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Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook

#71

Post by fab13n »

Decentralized = much harder to police by governments, authorities, big corps. This can unlock radically new usages.

For instance, in a fully decentralized system, you can get rid of storage limitations by storing stuff on your computer (or on the cloud in a private form). So you can share not only pics of your pets, but also your music and movies collection.

If this results in something as easy to use as Facebook, but uncontrollable and perfectly able to host and protect media piracy / political dissidence / etc., we get darknets for dummies. This project or a variant thereof, if successful, could deeply change Internet by taking all power out of authorities and into people's hand. Whether it's a good or a bad thing is debatable, but it certainly is interesting.

Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook

#72

Post by ericd »

jacquesm wrote: post #62
qq66 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is stirring up this kind of sentiment in less than 0.1% of their users.

Google news currently lists 449 articles about this, NYT, WP, WSJ and so on. You can bet that it's visible to a lot of people. Facebooks users are for the most part not capable of building an alternative but there are people that can, and this seems to bring them from having stuff 'on the drawingboard' to actually doing it. The next privacy cock-up and this kind of article will carry a list of alternatives.

To add one more, I saw a big feature article in freaking Consumer Reports this month about Facebook privacy issues, and them sharing more than you think. It seems to be hitting the mainstream in a big way.

Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook

#73

Post by r0h4n »

One solution i can think of is,

You Create your own data and keep it stored on your device(can be anything, laptop,desktop,mobile etc). When you visit some host, it knows where to find your data(we assign a common known to all social port to our host), but needs your permission to download the data.So now when a relation of yours visits the same host we visited, It can tell our relation that what we have done on the host, only after we both use a common key.

Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook

#75

Post by stcredzero »

thefool wrote: post #70
runevault wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why they build it such that people can simply pay a 3rd party that offers the service and just use them to hold their identity. Not as much control as hosting it yourself, but still not as bad as facebook where you can't leave and they hold EVERYONE's data.

I'm just not convinced that enough people actually care about that. The largest cell phone market is the one for generic simple phones that just make calls, regardless of the smartphone hype. The reason that IE is so ubiquitous is that a huge number of people don't really care, as long as they can get on the internet, and go on facebook and youtube and maybe a few other sites, thats enough for them. Hell, even look a…

What's so hard to leave about Dropbox? I don't even have to copy my data off. I already have multiple copies.

Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook

#76

Post by nandemo »

eavc wrote: post #17
marcusbooster wrote: post #5

Ugh, software teams are the new bands.

If a scintilla of the glamor of being drug-addled and minimally employed gets leeched by ambitious programmers, that's probably a net gain.

Well, we'd still need "programmer groupies". If they existed, I imagine economic growth would soar in the Western world.

(Though I don't really get marcus's point/joke, probably because I haven't watched the video.)

Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook

#77

Post by fab13n »

codemechanic wrote: post #67

Guys, we have this already. Just check out the tonido project. http://www.tonido.com

This seems to let you host media on your computer, and to work around the need to have a fix IP address or a dyndns account.

It doesn't seem to know about graphs of friends, which is the central principle of FB. FB is not about videos, YouTube is; FB is about getting the videos you like to spread across your friendship network.

However, it looks like a nice application, even if it's only remotely related to Diaspora or Facebook.

Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook

#78

Post by wanderr »

If a project like this were actually successful, it would be exciting news indeed. Not just for those who want to bail on facebook, but those who wish their blogs were more connected, or those who wish that livejournal wasn't dying a slow and pathetic death.

If they are hoping to be able to hook in to existing semi-closed systems like Facebook, though, they are aiming for a moving target that, as we've seen, isn't afraid to use the law to stop users from getting their data out.

I also wonder how they will handle communities. That is one thing that livejournal has always done quite well, and facebook's groups leaves a lot to be desired. I have a hard time imagining how that will work in a distributed environment, unless the community itself will not actually be distributed.

Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook

#79

Post by loup-vaillant »

thefool wrote: post #70
runevault wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why they build it such that people can simply pay a 3rd party that offers the service and just use them to hold their identity. Not as much control as hosting it yourself, but still not as bad as facebook where you can't leave and they hold EVERYONE's data.

I'm just not convinced that enough people actually care about that. The largest cell phone market is the one for generic simple phones that just make calls, regardless of the smartphone hype. The reason that IE is so ubiquitous is that a huge number of people don't really care, as long as they can get on the internet, and go on facebook and youtube and maybe a few other sites, thats enough for them. Hell, even look a…

If most people don't care, that's because they don't know. See, most people barely make the difference between their browser and a search engine. They don't think about the long term accessibility of their digital data, or about the preservation of their online privacy because they just don't know what it means. On the other hand, they do care about preserving (physical) family photos and important documents. They do care about their home not being spied.

I see people not caring as a lack of education. Computers are ubiquitous in the western world since less than a generation. The Internet is even younger. This is just too short for people to understand them (and their hazards). Just wait 20 years, and they will understand. At this point, they will care. Now, the question is whether we can accelerate the process or not.

Re: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook

#80

Post by loup-vaillant »

thefool wrote: post #40

Meh. I don't think software people understand just how disinclined a non-software person is to do anything requiring configuring serverside stuff. Even torrents, where clients have essentially become good enough that all you have to do is install them, most people get a friend that has some understanding of computers to set them up for them. The cloud is really a better model if you want to achieve widespread adoptio…

What about "plug and share" machines? I bet a plug computer[1] with everything installed on it could do the job. It doesn't need to be more complicated than Gmail.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug_computer

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