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Comment by tdb7893 | Hacker News Reader

People here seem to always want their social media to be decentralized but I doubt that would happen unless you could convince the standard consumer that it's actually better, and I think that's a hard argument to make to them. When I talk to people about what their solution looks like it tends to sacrifice usability, which no consumer wants to sacrifice

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To be specific-- the current choice is between well-understood, scalable, battle-tested centralized designs and half-baked, work-in-progress, decentralized designs that don't work very well.

Example-- building a centralized Facebook replacement is doable. Some idealistic developer can sit down one summer, break the problem into little pieces and iterate on it. If enough other developers and investors get interested, they can throw money at it to make it scale and attract a non-trivial userbase.

Building a decentralized Facebook replacement is simply not doable. An idealistic developer can sit down one summer, break the problem into little pieces but not all of them have viable solutions. I.e., how do you do discoverability? And more importantly, how do you do discoverability in a way that justifies the expense of decentralizing-- e.g., how do I query an untrusted node and receive an answer without that node knowing what I was searching for? The only extant solution I've seen on that is from Gnunet. And it doesn't do stemming or partial matches, so it's quite brittle and untested.

I think it's important to keep reminding people to describe the current decentralization efforts as an open research problem. Otherwise people get it in their heads that decentralization always has a particular set of inescapable costs, and not all of them are inescapable.

Edit: clarification

Youre setting the bar too high. RSS support in "microblogging" apps (including Facebook, ideally) gets you a simple federated social network. Discoverability could be handled by any number of third party aggregators, like Google. Publish your email to receive "DMs".

Something can be decentralized without bleeding edge p2p crypto tech.

The article criticizes Facebook because it "vacuums up information about our tastes, our shopping habits, our political beliefs, and just about anything else you might think of—is too powerful in the first place."

So what good does it do to push discoverability to the company that is currently vacuuming up all your searches and browsing history?

edit: typo

Mastodon, which is decentralised, looks like it's gaining traction, and I find it very easy to use.

Ok.

So what will happen that drives the adoption to scale? In other words, what is the Mastodon's decentralized equivalent of investors throwing tons of money into marketing a centralized Facebook competitor? (I'm wrongly assuming that centralized means proprietary here, but I already made that wrong assumption above so I'll stick to it for the moment...)

Probably nothing except more people using it, it doesn't have any (to my knowledge) unique features that Twitter and co. don't, so I don't think people are going to move there; rather I expect the same users of Twitter to go there and keep both their accounts; a few people I know have deleted their Twitter accounts to switch full time to Mastodon, with varying degrees of success.

So I'll echo what was said elsewhere: people aren't going to move and abandon their old social networks, at least in my opinion.

If we're going to build things without any likelihood of scaling them to replace centralized services, we'd be much better off spending the time on the UX side rather than the business logic side.

I'd much rather play around with some slick, futuristic-looking UI with stop-gap business logic behind it just to garner an idea of what would be possible if we had better decentralized platforms. How about a nice simple interface to choose N trusted friends to help me archive my posts? How about simulating a ransomware attack, then leveraging M/N friends to set up the account on a new device and having the system estimate how many posts the ransomware could access? Actually how about one that replaces passwords with M/N friends?

I'm probably being unnecessarily conservative in my ideas because I'm still stuck on our current technological limitations. The point is that if all the "alternatives" developers had been doing stuff like that instead of ineffectual Facebook/Twitter clones, there would probably be a lot more value in all that effort since the Snowden leaks.

I don't like it too much, as most people will just sign up for a public server and be be stuck there.

But, even if stuck there, they can subscribe to any user on any other GNUSocial compatible server.

>People here seem to always want their social media to be decentralized but I doubt that would happen unless you could convince the standard consumer that it's actually better, and I think that's a hard argument to make to them.

We need a well designed pretty home server that's as easy to set up and use as a smartphone. That's all, really.

The killer app would be ultra fast backup from your phone and laptop over a local network that subsequently drips over the internet (encrypted) to a friend or family member's home server.

Then, just put an app store on top. An ecosystem around that would spring up with all sorts of stuff that would sometimes be worse and sometimes be way, way, better than the centralized web. Any facebook equivalent would probably be way better.

I kind of wish this was what Mozilla was getting in on - it's way more disruptive than building Yet Another Smartphone/Desktop OS.

Most of the software to do all of this is actually already there, it just a matter of putting it together in an easy to use way and putting some lipgloss and snazzy marketing on it (not necessarily an easy task but very doable all the same).

It's worth remembering that smartphones were pretty uncool, nerdy and uninteresting to 'normal' people in 2006.

> We need a well designed pretty home server that's as easy to set up

What do you do about all those people whose ISPs don't allow them to run public facing server on residential connection?

VPN, maybe.

How do you get the typical consumer on a VPN?

Sell it as part of a service provided with the box.

Wikipedia was a technology that was at one point capable of becoming a competitor, but the found their niche and stayed there. I am working on an app (sbnode.com) that I hope WILL become a facebook + twitter killer some day. I want this software (not necessarily SubNode) to become "commodity software" just like Linux is as a OS. I would like to see a world where most instances of Linux are running SubNode and sharing the load of being the backbone of a new internet built directly on content repositories and JCR standards. It's a lofty goal, and my small part has been to at least create a working example of what such a system would be like.

I have a lot of capability now in SubNode, but it doesn't yet 'federate', beyond what the JCR can do insofar as storage distribution. However it does show what an internet 'could' be like if most everything was build out of 'SubNodes'... or at least in the area of Social Media, having this kind of open standard would revolutionize the internet, and make Facebook and Twitter look like Bell Telgraph: You know, the old, unneeded, proprietary, manipulative, 'sell your data to the highest bidder' type of social media that the world needs to get off of.

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