The Blog That Disappeared

The second component that's necessary in my opinion to achieve some kind of real momentum is early adopters that are not from the same techo geek background as we are. There are a lot of these groups that have an acute interest in circumventing silo restrictions, but they're usually not the kind of people I like to associate with - yet if there was one such community with a sufficiently non-deplorable ideology interested in this, it could eventually propel the idea into the mainstream.

I say "hate to admit" because I'm very much a proponent of decentralized services, and wish for more people to use them...but i guess like others my optimism might blind me a tad to the realities of typical/common user behaviors (and expectations), as well as the reasons and sources of those behaviors (and expectations). I guess users of decentralized services can continue to "throw their own parties", but it might mean not everyone will ever go to said parties. Ah well.

I think this is a matter of consumer preference for and understanding of an operating model.

Many years ago I worked for Demon in the UK and we gave away free email and fee webspace. The email was heavily used, and the webspace (just 10MB behind Apache) was barely taken up and if I remember discontinued.

The point is that back in 95 we could have written clients that stuck "updates" and photos onto 10mb of webspace (retrospectively that would have been an awesome project) - but ... We did not. We as in the technically minded employees did - scripts to upload last nights photos of drinking sessions abounded. But nothing offered to customers

I think Facebook was part of an explanation to consumers that you could "live" on the web. A confluence of Internet access, mobile, computing advances etc etc etc

Everyone understood email because it was an operating model we had analogue guides for. You write a letter, have it to the mail man who took it to its destination.

RSS is the equivalent of people nailing updates to their front door and waiting for people to come round and read it - That is the sensible way of doing this (currently I mail my updates to SF where Facebook puts it on a very very large front door)

perhaps a better economic argument is that email is more efficient - my MTA looks yours up only if I want to send you an email, and your MTA just waits for connections.

In the RSS / Facebook feed world, I need to poll all of my friends front doors for updates, which model starts to gain runaway efficiencies with the more people I am aggregating polls on behalf of. Facebook has already won that race before they started.

If we think the current situation is poor, we have the regulatory response (break up a monopoly) or the capitalist response (write diaspora and ...)

I think email was already in place before mass aggregation came to the web - and its economic model did not tend to a centralised model (if everyone uses Google as the POP3 endpoint, email itself is still decentralised)

But RSS (which covers status updates, broadcast messages, social media) these all economically tend to a single central polling approach. And it was not well established before Facebook era.

As such fighting Facebook will be an economic uphill battle as long as the only difference is where we poll for updates.

Perhaps the calculus will change with an emphasis on privacy. But even so I am posting stuff on my front door. How much privacy can I expect. If I am sending a message to you, it's messging if not it's a public update broadcast? There is no encryption model to send one message to lots of unspecified people (I would need to encrypt it for all my friends individually. Presumably that's what diaspora does). Even so I then have to message you. So why not just cc email.

I have lost my thread here, but perhaps I should say that the key here is the client and regulatory response.

A single client could easily aggregate secure messaging and feeds - but there is not a client to do that.

You could solve the aggregation race by sending mails as a poll trigger.

But you need to replace the client at the same time as requiring Facebook open up.

It seems the move off web browsers and onto apps was a retrograde step in many ways.

A good point, but I don't think it's economics. I believe the issue is more just interest. Even if it were made super easy, most people have no reason to switch. Sure, people who like their privacy want it, but those are the kinds of people who should, in fact, join together and start their own network and stop complaining that the vast majority of people won't join them. Maybe on our biz cards, we could put info to access our private networks, like diaspora, and that would give us an opportunity to promote it when people read it. Most people are sheep. They'll follow the crowd when something interests them, regardless of the technical or economic difficulty. I mean for Pete's sake - why on earth would anyone spend LOTs of money on "fashionable" jeans with HOLES? - But people do.

It's not my service, and I'm talking about the general case rather than this specific one, but that seems to me like it would be pretty complicated - you'd need some sort of review procedure to determine what material can and cannot be distributed, you'd need to somehow do this while preserving user privacy, and you'd need some engineering work to make all this possible.

A project of that scope could take weeks or months to complete, depending on the amount of data involved.