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Comment by bhl | Hacker News Reader

Ideally, open standards would mean that the network effects, which today keep people trapped in walled gardens like Facebook, would create a more distributed / federated community instead of a winner-takes-all model.

I think this is largely true, since if you could still communicate with your friends and family on Facebook but be on a different paid platform which doesn't track or advertise products to you, most people would go for it.

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Right, exactly. You can choose a different email provider if you hate the ads or what your current one is doing with your data. You can't pick a different Facebook and still communicate with your friends there.

You can pick a different one, but if they're all spying on you, tracking you, and advertising to you, it's not really going to make a difference.

Also, splitting up Facebook alone isn't going to stop data sharing between its various parts, nor is it going to address tracking or advertising at all.

But we can count the moments til a sacrificial lamb pops up, as with Bernie Madoff, or the epipen guy for pharma. Token examples without stopping the potential for their crimes to be repeated by everyone else in practice in the slightest.

We need to uninvent the wheel.

That will be a problem as you can't unring a bell - it is far easier to unscramble an egg.

With an open standard, I don't see why you can't host your own social network similar to how people host their own email servers or websites right now.

What's an "open standard for a social network"?

This is the question!

I look at what people do with reddit, Facebook, twitter, various forums, and it looks like a more spiffy USENET.

We have a piece of that standard.

More needed

Much. Much more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19368649

Currently, it seems to be ActivityPub, which projects like Mastodon use.

It's a protocol. People don't use social networks because of protocols.

Coming back to this statement:

> With an open standard, I don't see why you can't host your own social network

You also need:

- photo hosting

- video hosting

- comments

- timelines

- feeds

- search

- social graphs

- (etc.)

for a social network to have any relevance.

> People don't use social networks because of protocols.

I agree with this point: usability is often not affected by what happens in the back. However, with open standards, it would be possible that people create other social networks because of protocols.

You mention all these technical problems that have to be solved to create a social network. I can see someone building an open source framework for all of these. For example with personal websites, everything except social graphs and feeds already exist.

There are quite a few open source framework for all/many of these.

Mastodon, Scuttlebutt to name a few. They are somewhat popular, but they are bad at many of the things I described.

> You can pick a different one, but if they're all spying on you, tracking you, and advertising to you, it's not really going to make a difference.

If you can easily switch, then you can pretty easily find the one that isn't tracking you. The problem is that it's hard to switch.

This is the wrong problem definition and will fail.

You will ALWAYS have a centralized authority for social. No ifs, ands, or buts.

ANY successful network WILL create free space for attackers to target.

In email it was spam

In social media it’s false content, spam, manipulative advertising and so on.

You will ALWAYS have the problem of child porn, crime, and similar traveling over your network.

All of these MUST be solved, or normal users/society will target the network.

People here are solving Facebook. You need to solve for liability.

> You will ALWAYS have a centralized authority for social.

Email isn't centralized. IRC isn't centralized. Syndication platforms like RSS aren't centralized. Something like twitter could easily be decentralized by posting to some shared database like blockchain or simpler P2P systems.

> Email isn't centralized.

It is highly centralized. Corporate email aside, most people these days are using either their ISP or Gmail. Running your own mailserver is next to impossible because of dealing with both incoming spam AND having to keep up with the newest "anti-spam" trends that your server isn't blacklisted AND having to keep up with security updates.

> IRC isn't centralized.

Yes, IRC is next to dead, and most concentrates on the biggest networks (freenode, oftc, ...).

> Syndication platforms like RSS aren't centralized

RSS was a niche even before the death of Google Reader.

> Something like twitter could easily be decentralized by posting to some shared database like blockchain or simpler P2P systems.

Bitcoin blockchain can't even match the transaction rate of Visa and friends (~1700 TPS). Twitter averages at ~6000 TPS.

The sheer scale at which Twitter, Facebook, Whatsapp, Netflix and Youtube operate makes it very hard to replicate because the required infrastructure is extremely expensive, not to mention the support/moderation effort required to prevent the community from going down.

Federated != centralized

You can choose a different email provider. You can't choose a different Facebook provider.

For me, spam is easy. About 99% of it is rejected by using a regex methodology created by a gent in japan that he named "S25R". [1]

[1] - http://www.gabacho-net.jp/en/anti-spam/anti-spam-system.html

I've been using that for about 15 years. Works great. I even implemented it in a medium sized company. The only issues it caused were former employees that were running mail servers on their cable modem and stealing customers for their small businesses.

> Running your own mailserver is next to impossible because of dealing with both incoming spam AND having to keep up with the newest "anti-spam" trends that your server isn't blacklisted AND having to keep up with security updates.

I know this is a common perception, but I don't think that it has more than a kernel of truth to it. I run my own mailserver, and it requires me to spend, on average, maybe an hour a month in maintenance.

Yup. I’ve been running one for 15 years, and my maintenance might be a couple of hours every six months.

> Syndication platforms like RSS aren't centralized. Something like twitter could easily be decentralized ...

And they won't do it, since that's against their interests, hell twitter used to support RSS -even that was to much for them.

It sounds like the real issue is their insistence it 'must' be solved in absolutes. That absolutism leads to tyranny and the original problem going unsolved.

It is the same idiot-demagog loop of "We must do something and this is something! The fix made it worse? Do more something!" cheers

Hell the whole social media stir about internet misinformation is taking projection to previously unseen heights by everyone with an interest against a free internet.

> You will ALWAYS have a centralized authority for social. No ifs, ands, or buts.

You assert this as fact, but don't explain why you believe this to be true. I don't think your statement is self-evident at all.

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