Decentralized Social Networks Sound Great. Too Bad They’ll Never Work

Interesting article, but I don't really agree with their conclusions. I think social networks are legacy from first engaging people on the real web and have a fate similar to AOL.

Experiments in decentralized social are more of a test run of components for "subversive" networks that will eventually engage the global youth politically on tor rather than compete with fb for grandparents sharing photos and recipes or Myspace as a MP3 storage space for forty somethings with bands.

I, and my friends, have been using secure scuttlebutt and we couldn't be happier. I personally enjoy it because the content isn't curated, and the fact that my data resides on my computer and those in my gossip network. Beyond building your network there isn't much of a hurdle as the software takes care of all of the sharing of data.

https://www.scuttlebutt.nz

Facebook started as a clean alternative to MySpace. Facebook has now become even more bloated and painful to use than MySpace was.

One hypothesis for why Google+ and others did not "catch on" is because Facebook has orders of magnitude more users, and therefore has reached a "critical mass", meaning no significant amount of users will ever use an alternative.

My hypothesis is that there simply hasn't been a significantly superior alternative yet.

New alternatives can also use Facebook as an advantage by creating a compatible API. Facebook, of course, will "fight back" by making itself incompatible, but the only way it can do that is by making its own platform less usable.