It mystifies me that people seem to think users will suddenly start caring about decentralization and privacy. If either of those things is your social network's USP, you're sunk.
Unfortunately, Facebook explicitly forbids that kind of interaction, of course.
I see two options how decentralized nets could win:
1) Legislation that forces large sites like Facebook to federate (makes sense if you argue that FB has become infrastructure) or without that:
2) Lots of people try to build federated sites, and fail... but one day, Facebook goes the way of Yahoo and MySpace, and one of the decentralized contenders happens to be the new Facebook by chance.
This could happen faster than you might think. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 ([1]) just needs some updating to current technological standards.
Quoted:
> Interconnectedness. Since communications services exhibit network effects and positive externalities, new entrants would face barriers to entry if they could not interconnect their networks with those of the incumbent carriers. Thus, another key provision of the 1996 Act sets obligations for incumbent carriers and new entrants to interconnect their networks with one another, imposing additional requirements on the incumbents because they might desire to restrict competitive entry by denying such interconnection or by setting terms, conditions, and rates that could undermine the ability of the new entrants to compete.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996
Interesting reading material: http://benkler.org/Pub.html .
That is already happening. The majority is there only because of the messaging aspect.
A whole plethora of messaging services are gaining traffic. Next thing that follow in them is "smart AI" for content with "bots" and then we'll reinvent what Asian messengers already offer for years.
But convincing an user of $chat with decentralization and federation is laughable, until :
1) he gets a good reason for current $chat to not be as good,
2) his network flocks away to something else.
Don't want to be pissing on anyone's parade here, but this Akasha Project is currently putting a cart before the horse.
For those that do not care about the decentralized/freedom of speech/privacy aspects embedded in our app we think they might find it interesting thanks to the way good content and thoughtful commentary can generate "real money" rather than "points".
For those that don't care about the money either and just want a nice user experience without being bombarded with spam and ads, we think that they might find it attractive thanks to the clean and intuitive UX/UI we designed. We don't like ads either and we're set on experimenting with alternative business models made possible by cryptocurrencies in general in the pursuit for a sustainable social media network model that doesn't rely on ads.
Then, there's also the people that actually create and do things such as writers, artists and activists. They might appreciate AKASHA for different reasons as it allows them to connect more directly with their fan base/followers by-passing in the process some of the blocks that come in various forms on Web 2.0 platforms.