Disruption means doing something that your competitors are effectively incapable of doing.
Personally, I live for the struggle.
I think that's a worthy goal, though I'm not convinced it we'll achieve it because of the amount of money the vested interests can throw at preventing it. But it remains a good idea, even if it never becomes mainstream.
OK. But why would they? What is the raison d'etre for such a company to exist? What is the competitive advantage here for those companies to actually do that? How does this not turn into a hilarious race-to-the-bottom that zeroes out any reason for anybody to do it in the first place?
I am profoundly unconvinced that you're going to ever beat a Twitter or a Facebook and it's not because of "vested interests preventing it", it's because the current options meet the needs and desires of the userbase. The size of the group that cares about self-hosting something like this is within epsilon of zero percent. Because nobody cares, there is no network effect to pull other people.
Mind you, Telegram is funded by one wealthy benefactor, and I'd argue its a reasonably large service not attempting to compete for profit against other incumbents.
What're the odds the "winner" of the ensuing fight is the decentralized FOSS platform — that has very real tangible benefits, but ones that are hard to explain to an average user — over the shiny new VC-funded Twitter clone that can throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at user acquisition?
If/when social platforms begin to use more universal/interchangable/inter-communicational standards, the various silos can still compete - including private/self-hosted, community-hosted, for-profit silos, etc. - though the competition won't be on limiting communication, but rather can this silo/site provide better uptime/availability, or can that silo/site develop better mobile/desktop/web clients, or can a silo/site offer better discoverability, or even (for the for-profit silos) can this silo/site offer more relevant ads, etc.
While I definitely believe that would be a fantastic thing for the world if it happened, I'm curious about what the practical path is to get people to actually use decentralized services, when individual platforms don't yet have any incentive to bring down their garden walls.
So lets speak enthusiastically about it then! It costs you nothing and it helps to level the playing field against incumbents like twitter etc.
Personally I find the whole microblogging concept overhyped and really just want open social networks with adjustable privacy (along the lines of google+, just open source or at least multi-vendor) + chat, group chat, channels, bots etc along the lines of Telegram.
Actually that social network could just be an improved version of Wordpress/Blogger etc where I can straightforwardly choose what is visible to anyone, to colleagues, family etc etc.
It costs me my network on Twitter. Where everyone already is.
> Personally I find the whole microblogging concept overhyped
That's great, but that's also irrelevant to what this is.
Those are not the same thing. "Decentralised" implies that the functionality is provided by a bunch of nodes that communicate together. A MediaWiki instance is a single website that doesn't communicate to other MediaWiki instances for its functionality.
Smallest Federated Wiki (https://wardcunningham.github.io/) is closer to what a decentralised wiki software would be.
It was being used to refer to the fact that a company wiki isn't under a central authorities control. This was the common contextual usage of decentralised in this thread (stemming from the fact that all twitter accounts are under a central authorities control).
"decentralised" is such a mess of a term by itself.
The only conceivable reason it would is if individual providers found value data mining it.
Note: Twitter has ~313 million active monthly users. Only 0.0006 percent of those users would need to find interest in this sort of new platform for it to be viable (at the price point I mention above).
Even if we assume that $200m/yr from OSM (which has a much easier job than Twitter, scaling) is reasonable, this new system people are proposing lacks a lot of fundamental discovery features that make Twitter valuable.
And yet again, even if they are addressed then this means many more people would need to pitch in for the initial customer acquisition and community building. I know many people at Twitter who labor to do exactly that sort of thing to this very day.
People buidling these networks think their technology is what's valuable, and there is a threshold of scale you have to meet (which btw, I do not think the projects involved here have demonstrated), but after that it's the community that has the real value.
My experience with Mastodon is a blank screen with a single message from me, "I wonder how I meet people here?"
Even the word "microblogging" captures fundamentally the wrong idea about what drives the core of twitter's community and engagement.
That's the hard part. Why would they be interested? There are tons of microblogging platforms available.
USPs work best when they address an acute problem the person you're pitching it to has to struggle with every day.
Nobody in the general public is looking at Facebook or Twitter and thinking "this would be so much better if it made me pay money and deal with installing software."
It is very common business lingo, but you couldn't be blamed for ignoring such things.
In case anyone mentions, https://twitter.com/facebook is also ridiculous.
I disagree. Should socialists not be allowed to use computers because capitalism made computers and they are betraying their cause by using one? (Simple/contrived example, but it makes the point)
How is anybody going to even hear about this project if it doesn't advertise on social media?
Protecting free speech in the face of ideological pressure is an option.
Granted, that's easier said than done.
however, I do agree... This is not the first Twitter clone on here?
Most people are on Facebook and Twitter. That is our target market. The question isn't, "how do I maintain control of my media?", that's actually not a hard problem. The problem that needs solving is this:
How can we, the people, compete directly with enormously wealthy corporate entities? We have them hooked on free software, that's a huge win, but how do we go from there to user acquisition? How do we do support? Marketing? How do we ensure good UX? Does it cost money? How do we pay for our time? I don't pretend to know the answer, but I think these are things the FOSS community needs to spend some time thinking about.
And that's the tip of the iceberg.
This would allow freedom for indie authors to own their content (in the scenario where one of the big social network silos shuts down, or the big boys for some reason wish to censor an author's content, etc.) and post their content however they wish and from wherever they wish, but still allow them to retain audience (those users who are fine just living on the big social network silos)...This is not unlike email, where i can send a message to pretty much any legitimate email address regardless of the silo (I'm leaving out spam blocks out of discussion of course).
Is that really everything that all the developers in the world could conceive? Is that the definition of "social network"?