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Comment by deanclatworthy | Hacker News Reader

Whilst the founder has credibility in this space, I don't see what the problem is they are solving. There are many communities all across the internet, and also in centralised places like Facebook & reddit. Forums still remain hugely popular for niche community operators.

The only way social is going to work and be improved going forward is through decentralisation and taking our data out of the hands of a central repository where it can be used to target us, and is more vulnerable to breaches. Once we have that baseline the other problems can be solved by the communities themselves.

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I don’t understand the decentralized part of your comment. There’s a reason Facebook and perhaps AOL before it was successful - it’s easy and everyone is there.

I’m a huge privacy advocate but the decentralized Facebook alternatives are a little wonky for most to get their heads around. Jane Average user could care less about blockchain hosted personal data. In most cases Jane just wants Facebook and is a little worried about what’s happening to her data. Facebook maybe more than any other alternative is in the best position to solve the user problem here.

I agree. The whole issue with the first decentralised networks at the moment are their usability and accessibility to the average person. There’s a lot of work to be done on this. There are 1000s of people tackling the problem globally from the protocol level to the user interfaces.

My point is these networks will and need to replace the centralised social model which is what this new network is.

Decentralized is the only way to know for sure your data is not being treated server-side against your wishes. This will certainly be the future of the social internet.

However, blockchain is absolutely not the only decentralization support, and might be the worst candidate to store data ever. If your comment about that was not a joke, then maybe you should actualize your knowledge on decentralized algorithms (for example, strong consensus as in the blockchain can be achieved using stellar consensus protocol, and many decentralized services work perfectly using peer to peer technology - not only file sharing).

Also, I find your comment about "Jane Average" quite inappropriate. Anyone can understand it's bad to give too much power to companies whose interests are financial. Moreover, it's inacurate : the current scandal and outfire against Facebook mostly comes from "Jane Average" people, and not the technical community who's mostly saying "we already knew it".

> blockchain is absolutely not the only decentralization support, and might be the worst candidate to store data ever

Thank you! Was about to reply the same thing when I read that comment.

> for example, strong consensus as in the blockchain can be achieved using stellar consensus protocol

I don't really think a social network needs that much consensus. Not for personal data anyway. As you control your own data, there is no need for consensus with others :)

>Decentralized is the only way to know for sure your data is not being treated server-side against your wishes. This will certainly be the future of the social internet.

As a society, we are not even close to being there. There isn't a single person I personally know who has decided to leave Facebook for this reason.

>Moreover, it's inacurate : the current scandal and outfire against Facebook mostly comes from "Jane Average" people, and not the technical community who's mostly saying "we already knew it".

Frankly, I see little evidence of this. It seems mostly coming from activists.

> Jane Average user could care less about blockchain hosted personal data.

Agreed, but judging from the last few weeks, Jane Average apparently does care:

- they have control over their data

- can see the stuff they want

- and can have good blocking tools

Which all require decentralisation (in latter case because open APIs hurt monopolies).

End users don't care about data structures in any system, centralised or not.

Can Jane Average understand how email works? Because that's really all their is to understand about distributed social networks: you own your data, but if you send someone a message you should consider it public (could be shared/forwarded to anyone) unless you trust the recipient not to share it.

I am not really sure what you are talking about...a email account consists of either emails you received or emails you sent.

So naturally for all your emails you have in your inbox the sender has them in their outbox...and every email you sent also exists as a copy in somebody else’s inbox.

And you can’t control whether the other parties host their own email server or if they use a hosted service...in which case, guess what: now a third party also has a copy.

Now to hosting your own email server...who is gonna stop your Datacenter from obtaining a copy of your emails? They call it backups ;)

It’s easy to talk to your Barista about decentralization and blockchain as the solution to privacy...but actually making that a reality is not.

And we haven’t even touched on spam...how you gonna fight that in a decentralized network? How about bots?

I could go on but I hope you get the picture.

spam filters work pretty well for email these days. are you suggesting that effective spam filtering mandates a centralized single-company controls-everything architecture for email? why social networks?

Spam filters work well because they are centralized! It requires a lot of data to train the ML models...its not just a static blacklist

Nope, lots of effective anti-spam tools are open source and take advantage of crowd-sourced spam analysis. I remain unconvinced of the need for one company to control it.

I don't really see the decentralized argument. I believe it's meant to solve a noble intent but in reality for a network to be successful all the information has to be readily available. You can't have a social network that says "Hey, thanks for posting about your birthday... we'll ensure it filters out to all nodes within at least 21 days".

So if all information has to be accessible and any node has access to all of it, or can aggregate it over time, then it's effectively centralized. Not to mention multiple nodes means anyone can tap into the information stream for whatever purpose.

So I see a case where centralization is somewhat critical but with tighter controls over what that data can be used for. Facebook was a headlong charge into new territory in information management and now I think we need to step back and examine how we better manage that.

That said I've spent about as much time thinking on it in depth as I have writing this post so I may be missing something quite obvious.

this. First, the thing that none of the decentralize advocates recognize is that outside of HN and the tech community, no one cares! When you mention the word "decentralized" to Joe Schmo of the world, you already lost him. He has no idea what you're talking about and doesn't care.

Second, there is no way that a decentralized social network is going to have the quality and feature development that a centralized company will have. There is a reason people build great things in this world from buildings, to widgets, to software etc. It's called incentive. Capitalism drives innovation and it's a requirement to have the quality of product that is needed to draw eyeballs off existing platforms.

Lastly, I don't buy the argument that centralized companies can't be responsible with data. Do we trust banks to hold our money? The future is not decentralized social networks.

> Whilst the founder has credibility in this space, I don't see what the problem is they are solving.

I imagine his problem is: he wants to make money :)

The problem it solves is Google+ lol.

troll. Orkut was a big thing before G+ came along; wouldn't be surprised if that one sucked up some of orkut's users, then lost interest and never returned to orkut, going to Facebook instead.

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