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Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

So, email then? It's decentralized, federated, and only sends data to the people you address it to (gmail excepted, I guess, at least in the free tier).

It's what has always worked for me.

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it should be email. but you need to build a fabulous UX on top of it that is as simple and instant gratification as Facebook, and you need to do it essentially for free, or with a grant or something, because it will never make a dime.

Why doesn't this exist already? Sounds very feasible. Your "friends" are people in a given mailing-list, and even a minute action such as "like" could also just be an email sent to that mailing-list, with some proper tagging in the subject header, so that the email client knows not to display the email but rather act on it as an event handler.

One important functionality gap, between FB and email, is that email always creates copies that are easily controlled by the recipient by design. While it's technically true that a FB recipient could be auto-scraping everything, practically that's not true, which allows people to retroactively delete things with a large chance of success.

I feel like reasonably effective retro-active deletion is an important feature of a social network, as it gives users more control.

Very good point. I guess if we're going to use email as a substitute for Facebook we could use messages containing deletion/update directives. Clients could still of course decide to ignore them or interpret them however they wish.

Just send content as <img src=...> in a secondary server that can be deleted whenever.

It's just not a reasonable expectation. Either you give the control over the data to a central authority, or you give the control to the user, you can't have both.

> Either you give the control over the data to a central authority, or you give the control to the user [receiver?], you can't have both.

No, there are middle grounds, such as a decentralized/local authorities. E.g. you send a hyperlink to the message on your server, rather than the message itself. Theoretically, you've still ceded control to the receiver, but practically, in most cases, you haven't.

Well, yes, but decentralized "authorities" still have an incentive to do what their users want, and if there is a market for "no remote cancellation" accounts, then they will exist. It's quite different from one central authority that would be acting against its own interest if it did that.

twitter is essentially auto-scraped and in general, I think if my friends posted something, I've seen it, and I should be able to keep a copy of it. one feature of the "email as a social network" idea is that it really would be just "your friends". you wouldn't be exposed to far-flung randos the way facebook likes to game you into doing.

yup, that's been my idea for a few years now, see if you can get PG to run with it. You're welcome.

Yes! Email has the best chance to take over.

Links to photos, events, and group chat can all happen using email as transport. Like @esfandia suggested, the social-emails could be tagged as hidden so they are not displayed by your regular email reader.

Here is a old write up of how "events" could work over email: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12671812

Does anyone know if something like this has been tried before? Surely someone has thought of this before...

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