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Comment by rocky1138 | Hacker News Reader

How about this: you buy a physical device at Wal-Mart for $29.99, plug it in, hook it up to your wifi and leave it plugged into an outlet. It's got Mastodon or GNU Social on it and could look like this, but branded: http://thegadgetflow.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/SmartPlu...

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And then my internet connection goes down. Power goes out. I run over my data cap for the month. Comcast shuts me down for running a home server. My home network gets DDoS'd. I miss a patch day and I get hacked.

None of these things are a concern on traditional social networks. They have to be solved before the world has any chance of moving to a decentralized network.

They have to be solved before the world has any chance of moving to a decentralized network.

I say no. Most of them don't have to be solved first.

Feel free to convince me that 3 days of downtime on my personal messaging account cannot have my personal account is a problem.

It doesn't matter how you feel about it, take a look at people complaining when Google put a news article about Facebook at the top of the results instead of the Facebook login page:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/feb/11/face...

These are people who typed "Facebook Login" into a Google search, clicked the first result without reading, and got confused. Now tell these same users that Comcast blocked their social network or that they can't log in on their phone because their home Internet connection is down.

If you want a social network filled with just people like you and me, look at App.net or GNU Social for inspiration. If you want average users to sign in, these issues absolutely do have to be solved.

Still not convinced. It doesn't need to be for everyone in the beginning.

The early web (when I entered and before) wasn't for everyone. And thats OK for me. Actually I think it is a good way to start.

The problems were solved with centralization.

For this tbing I don't care about those problems.

"he early web (when I entered and before) wasn't for everyone. And thats OK for me. Actually I think it is a good way to start."

It got where it went by doing the opposite of what you're suggesting. The walled garden for smart elites were mostly working on OSI from what old timers tell me. The TCP/IP, SMTP, etc involved lots of hackers trying to avoid doing too much work. Much like the users you prefer to filter. Then, it just went from there getting bigger and bigger due to low barrier of entry. Tons of economic benefits and business models followed. Now we're talking to each other on it.

The early web was devoid of average users. Then the flow of newcomers and not knowing better users surpassed the old timers and knowledgeable users. Then we entered a leveling downward race to a web tailored to their needs because they're the large majority.

It's not that hard for the hypothetical manufacturer to set `git pull` and `apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y` to run on a cronjob every morning at 4am.

What do you call traditional social networks ? To me a traditional social network is an AFK thing.

If you're internet connection goes down, power goes out, you get DDoS'D this would hinder your ability to use any third party online service anyways. The data cap and ISP restrictive terms of service are a different problem that would be challenged and fixed given internet subscriber would go the p2p self host way. The commercial ISP situation is a terrible mess right now. If you got hacked unplug from network, boot from recovery, restore from backup, you're back online in less time than it takes to recover a hacked facebook account.

You say decentralized but it seems to me you meant distributed here.

Putting another barrier in front of it is not what's needed for people to use it. Treat it like email (or heck, early Facebook), get big clusters of users in by convincing universities and colleges to run a campus server. Businesses would also be a good idea but a harder sell

I do quite like this idea. And, it has precedence.

Then I have yet another device permanently plugged in and running, at a time where I and frankly all of us should try to reduce our energy consumption.

Ha. Good joke.

A Raspberry Pi is very low-powered though, it's completely insignificant compared to the power used by the webservices you use daily.

I disagree. Google uses 1/4GW worldwide and that's less than a watt per user.

Where does that number come from?

One data center * 24 backup generators * 3 MW each = 72 MW per data center. Four of those = 288 MW > 1/4GW.

Google has more than three data centers.

Ah yes, that number is from 2011, published by Google. Can't find the original. But it was widely reported[1].

Assuming that they're doubling energy consumption every year they'd have reached 8GW in 2016. That's 8W per user if we assume 1 billion users. Energy usage of a Raspberry is not insignificant relative to even this.

Doing things at scale is vastly more efficient. And only a subset of Google services can be relegated to a Raspberry. Even if you host your own mails, are you ready to ditch the Google search index and Youtube?

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/technology/google-details-...

If the power consumption of a RPi for each household with someone like us is a major thing then I say we have come pretty far in reducing waste of energy. :-)

People don't want another thing to plug in even if it's low-power. IoT is still nascent and I already don't have enough outlets in my house...

It's always going to be running somewhere.

I'd rather see a universal single consumer server with easy download and plugins for all of this stuff. Host my social network, my mail server, my cloud apps, etc. Basically, make social network a part of OwnCloud and sell OwnCloud boxes. Instead of a million small devices, I do one big one... and "big" can still be RaspPi.

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