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Decentralized Social Networks Won't Work

wired.com

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Re: Decentralized Social Networks Won't Work

#91

Post by hndamien »

phkahler wrote: post #61
nstart wrote: post #21

Just in case any bright eyed hopeful person is reading this, please don't think "ah shucks" and go away. Some of the biggest things in the internet including the protocols the internet lives on were never envisioned as something that would change the life of billions of people. They were initially created to solve a problem for a small group and then grew into something much bigger over time. Please please don't back…

I have given some thought to this problem and I think it's technically solvable. The main problem is that it would be non-profit so less incentive to build it. Anyone want to kick around ideas?

Bitcoin started as a non-profit (obviously not technically but my point is, cryptocurrencies allow you to leverage and trade value created without external money)

Re: Decentralized Social Networks Won't Work

#92

Post by pg_is_a_butt »

2sk21 wrote: post #25
nstart wrote: post #21

Just in case any bright eyed hopeful person is reading this, please don't think "ah shucks" and go away. Some of the biggest things in the internet including the protocols the internet lives on were never envisioned as something that would change the life of billions of people. They were initially created to solve a problem for a small group and then grew into something much bigger over time. Please please don't back…

You are right - after reading this article, it just seemed to confirm my opinion the decentralized networks don't work but we ought not to give up.

decentralized networks only work to connect centralized nodes... there is always a local authority. a 51% attack allows anyone to disrupt the larger network, so local nodes get more and more locked down to prevent that. even 5% network attacks could still sway opinion or spam and disrupt many local nodes, so the centralized nodes lock down further.

we can't have nice things because assholes are allowed to live.

you're all idiots.

Re: Decentralized Social Networks Won't Work

#93

Post by tyywebb »

arkh wrote: post #69

Here is the problem I have with most advertised decentralized social networks. Their only added value is being decentralized. Decentralized twitter / facebook / instagram. What do you gain from using those decentralized things? Nothing aside from being a hipster. And you lose your current social connections. Even worse, decentralized solutions existed before and are still available: blog software, bulletin boards, IR…

You gain control over the platform you're using. That's illustrated in the first paragraph of the Wired article.

People are getting pretty sick of getting pushed around by these mega corporations whether it's when they're telling you what software you're allowed to have on your cell phone or what you're allowed to write on a social media site. I think the next decade is going to be defined by an explosion in decentralized technologies.

Re: Decentralized Social Networks Won't Work

#94

Post by htormey »

I think viable alternates to Facebook/Twitter have less to do with the underlying technology and are more about attracting audiences not served by these social networks. Hence I think the next viable alternative to twitter/Facebook will probably be a centeralized one that caters to multiple niche communities.

Mastodon was released in October 2016, it currently has about 800k users spread across 2000+ servers.

Currently the maintainer of mastodon gets ~$2800 from Patreon to host one of the main #mastodon servers & work on the project.

Mastodon is kind of like Wordpress for niche communities who want a twitter like experience outside of twitter for 1 reason or other.

Right now one of the biggest use cases for mastodon is lolicon in Japan.

Here is how much it costs to host your own instance:

https://masto.host/

Let’s contrast mastodon with gab. Gab (centralized) was launched August 2016 has about ~270k users, 3,000+ customers and it just raised $1m. It also gets mainstream media recognition.

The main use case for gab is people with political views that were booted off of twitter. Aka free speech. Right now gabs community is not really my cup of tea but I can see why you would use it.

I think something like gab has more of a chance of going mainstream by collecting fringe communities effected by stuff like the adpocalypss than mastodon does.

I think his mainly because of the problems around federated identity. A good critique of this can be read here:

https://medium.com/m/global-identity?redirectUrl=https://hac...

Re: Decentralized Social Networks Won't Work

#95

Post by nine_k »

scandox wrote: post #26
nstart wrote: post #21

Just in case any bright eyed hopeful person is reading this, please don't think "ah shucks" and go away. Some of the biggest things in the internet including the protocols the internet lives on were never envisioned as something that would change the life of billions of people. They were initially created to solve a problem for a small group and then grew into something much bigger over time. Please please don't back…

I'd like to add one remark to this: everything doesn't have to be huge. We don't have to deal always in millions and billions. Small groups. Even individuals. What they do is meaningful. What we do is not pointless just because it doesn't create some massive impact.

A large service is a service where your friends, parents, coworkers, etc have a high probability to have already joined, thus making the service instantly more useful for communicating with them. Next thing is that you and they will pull in your other related people, again for ease of communication. This is the "network effect".

For a federated service, like email or phone, this is not a problem: the union of all service providers is the entire service, and more providers can connect. So connecting to any compliant provider is fine, and providers have an incentive to be good, or at least outcompete each other by some metric.

For a siloed and sealed-up service, like Facebook or Twitter, once you and (most of) your social graph is there, there's no way anyone can connect from the outside; to be connected with you, they need to dive into the same silo. The bigger the service grows, the harder it becomes for people outside not to consider joining, because of the pull of the part of their social graph who already joined.

I think that federated services will always exist, as long as unimpeded internet connectivity is allowed. I also think that 1-2 huge walled gardens will also exist, for the same reasons why phishing using dancing kittens videos will continue to exist: many humans are emotion-driven and don't value [insert a list here] when overwhelmed by a positive emotion from something new, cute, and free to use.

Re: Decentralized Social Networks Won't Work

#96

Post by ashark »

gwenzek wrote: post #62
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #32

"People do not want to operate their own servers" ... oh, how much I hate that argument. There are so many baseless assumptions in there. What does "operate a server" even mean? Is "loading a web page that accepts WebRTC requests" "operating a server"? Obviously, what people mean is some sort of "people don't want to learn how to manage the installation and configuration of a linux distribution on the command line".…

Totally agree with you. I think a successful decentralized network should come with pre-configured Raspberry Pi that would act as a web server hosting the user pictures, contacts… And maybe a bit of friends data for backup.

1) What happens when it breaks? If you plug in a new one, will it auto-restore? Where from? 2) Updates. How do they happen, who does them? What about when they go wrong? What about 5 years in when there are three models of the device (or way, way more if it's not proprietary) and an update goes out that bricks one?

Difficulty: the answers to the above must leave you with a product easy to use and reliable enough to compete with doing approximately zero work to use and maintain a Facebook account. Plus it needs to offer at least as many features.

I've for some time wanted a kind of private swarm-storage product (probably using IPFS, I guess, for lack of alternatives) that lets you plug in a new node at a friend/relative's house with a few TB of storage, put in the credentials (keys, bootstrap node[s]) for the swarm, and has it intelligently back up some amount of content from the network such that everything has at least X copies (3, say) while making all the rest available (that's where IPFS helps) on request, with some interface for adding content to the swarm from any node. The above problems have kept me from attempting even this task. A social network would be even harder.

Re: Decentralized Social Networks Won't Work

#97

Post by tyywebb »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #51
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here is the challenge: There is a kid born in rural Africa. How could you proof to someone with a smartphone in the US that this human being exists? Better question: What would you even need that proof for?

So that the other side knows they're talking with (and maybe talking about, or sending resources to) a real human being who actually is a rural African kid, and not with a server farm of some sleazy US advertiser who autogenerated a fake profile.

The problem of figuring out whether someone is the real person or an imposter (problem of identity) is a completely different problem from verifying a person's circumstances.

Re: Decentralized Social Networks Won't Work

#98

Post by Alex3917 »

csydas wrote: post #63
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #32

"People do not want to operate their own servers" ... oh, how much I hate that argument. There are so many baseless assumptions in there. What does "operate a server" even mean? Is "loading a web page that accepts WebRTC requests" "operating a server"? Obviously, what people mean is some sort of "people don't want to learn how to manage the installation and configuration of a linux distribution on the command line".…

> Arguably, home routers are servers. People routinely "operate" home routers. So, people routinely operate their own servers. This is quite arguable, as most people plug in a router, or even more commonly, have Comcast do it for them. And you are closer to the mark with the "configuration of a linux distribution on the command line" bit. Look at adoption rates for GPG and some of the blog posts/comments on it. [1],[…

> This is quite arguable, as most people plug in a router, or even more commonly, have Comcast do it for them.

So replace router with Apple TV.

Re: Decentralized Social Networks Won't Work

#99

Post by tyywebb »

amelius wrote: post #22
codewithcheese wrote: post #3

What short sighted click bait. Steem has already solved or partially solved most of these problems and we haven't even scratched the service. Read the Steem white paper [1] if you want your mind blown. [1] https://steem.io

I wonder if the concepts in Steem could be applied to the real economy, to arrive at a more fair distribution of wealth.

That would be interesting. Basically instead of companies existing, make every project in the world an open source project on a blockchain and people get compensated for contributing directly as a consequence of how the blockchain works.

Re: Decentralized Social Networks Won't Work

#100

Post by ojr »

egypturnash wrote: post #90
ojr wrote: post #86

decentralized social networks won't work because in order to keep a business running you need profits or the expectation of profits to acquire the talent needed to provide a nice user experience. Solutions motivated by capitalism will not disappear anytime soon. "But email is decentralized". Actually not true, it is heavily centralized around gmail. Same true with bitcoin, it is centralized around exchanges.

Decentralize the funding; rely on users rather than advertising or VC. Developing Mastodon is now the full-time job of he guy who wrote it, thanks to Patreon. I think he's starting to hire a few people, too. And a lot of Mastodon servers also have their own Patreons to help out with the hosting costs.

To be an accredited investor in the United States, you need to make at least $200,000 a year or have $1,000,000 in assets. Would you rather be funded by users of your app or accredited investors? I think in a free market, the most competitive companies will prefer the second option.
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