The End Of Facebook and Free Software's Quiet Revolution | Hacker News Reader

The End Of Facebook and Free Software's Quiet Revolution

developer.appleseedproject.org

Walled gardens can last a long time. You could argue that if a walled garden lasts as long as a technology is relevant, before open source competitors can come in, the walled garden has 'won'. I'd argue in this sense, Windows won: it was never bested by Linux on the desktop, even though it is now largely irrelevant.

It could turn out that Facebook stays prosperous until the world shifts to the next big thing, but well before any open source alternative takes hold and dominates.

I'd argue in this sense, Windows won: it was never bested by Linux on the desktop, even though it is now largely irrelevant.

And what made it irrelevant? The web, a collection of open standards and protocols.

His point still stands somewhat. Windows won by maintaining control of the OS market, though the OS market became less directly relevant due to the fact that the web became the dominant force in commercial computing.

That irrelevance is exactly what I'm referring to. Sometimes it doesn't come in the form of a direct competitor. Sometimes, open protocols route around walled gardens.

It may not be a Facebook clone built in a distributed fashion that forces Facebook to open up, it may instead be a whole new approach to social applications that nobody's thought of yet. That's fine.

I'd say it's a bit early to call Windows irrelevant - certainly one look at Microsoft's bottom line would suggest that Windows is still very relevant.

In some ways, yes, the choice of operating system is now largely irrelevant - if you mainly use web based stuff. But then again, walk into any corporate office in the world and there is a massive, massive probability that the only operating system you will see on desktops is Windows.

And also a massive probability that everyone there is running Office, plus a bunch of internal applications written specifically for that office, which only work on Windows.

You're missing the fact that Windows, as far as walled gardens and open standards go, is somewhere in the middle.

I.e. to run your applications on Windows, you don't need approval from Microsoft. To install Windows on a PC you also don't need approval from Microsoft. And the SDK has always been free of charge (contrary to other alternatives at the time).

Diaspora had the money and popular backing, but it also looks as if they made some fairly unfortunate design decisions which meant that they couldn't run on ARM based servers (the "freedom box" concept).

I don't understand the appeal of those plug computers when you can get a VPS for ~$60/year.

Well speaking as a hardened recessionista the appeal is that I have all my data under my control, where I can easily back it up, am not subject to any whimsical "terms and conditions", and pay ~$0/year in hosting fees. From my point of view spending £80 on a plug computer was one of the best value purchases I've ever made.

I have all my data under my control, where I can easily back it up, am not subject to any whimsical "terms and conditions", and pay ~$0/year in hosting fees.

How 90s.

And probably, how 2020s. The wheel turns.

That only matters to the people on the rim.

I doubt if FOSS will even make a dent in Facebook, as the Free Software web2.0-apps-ecosystem is very different from that of FOSS desktop/server-software:

0) It is harder to raise money for FOSS, especially in the startup-phase (so if competing endeavors are closed, they will have the financial edge, which could be an important disadvantage if you're doing something innovative...).

A) If it is a centralized Affero GPLed app:

1) There is a barrier to installation on local/development machines (try getting your first time hesitant developer to install MySQL, ruby and a host of gems). A barrier that is smaller / nonexistent for desktop software, because to use it at all, you have to install it.

2) There is a barrier to updates, a fix somebody applied to his local copy still has to be checked and deployed to the server(s) before he even can use it (if it is a feature relying on his data on the production-server).

B) If it is a GPLed P2P web-app:

1) There are critical mass issues for updates of social functionality (how to get most people to to update? and how to coordinate different version). If updates are automated or even go through a package manager, you're back at A2.

2) The required architecture will be much more complicated compared to centralized apps with the same functionality (at least while the centralized app is small enough to run on one server / cluster).

Not that it is absolutely impossible, but I tried (option A, a forum/wiki-type app) and was, to say the least, not wildly successful :) (though we/I did get a decent app completed, and I'm doing fine otherwise) (could just be the things I was building, ymmv): http://foundation.logilogi.org/

Oh, and naturally, for social networks it is even harder, as there is an additional critical mass effect in the network itself (not useful as long as most of your friends are still hanging out on FB, and unlike us programmers / geeks, they generally don't care that much about code and FOSS-freedoms, and at best mildly about data-freedoms. They are mostly happy about not having to worry about software and updates at all...).

IMHO, the rising of Facebook and Twitter is due to email spams defeated email user experience in 2000s. FB and Twitter provide a much higher signal to noise level than email for common users without knowing spam filters and all other craps.

So maybe the thing that replaces FB or Twitter is something that makes my communication with my family and friends better. What will that be, we will know when it rises.

Or, the consequences of privacy violations will defeat the social networking user experience in 2010s, and others are going to provide a platform that enables better communication with family and friends without reverting your privacy settings every other day and retroactively opening up all your data to everyone ;-).

This is how I have always felt. I think Facebook's best move is to be that "popular hub". Turn from evil to good. But, of course, they wont. Zuck likes money.

What makes you think Zuck likes money? I think he likes building a business, and I think his ideas about the future of social networking may involve a lot less privacy than you (or I) would like, but really the only significant thing he's done with his money so far is to give a lot of it away.

What's the point of trying to own all that information if not for money?

Right - that's the business' money. It's fun for Zuck to run the business. He doesn't need or worry about cash at this point.

What's the point of owning money?

That, sir, I do not know.

Late reply, but from my perspective, money is a wealth object. (so are information, knowledge, personal network, name value, skills, and etceterum). wealth is about ability to change the world around you. Money's certianly easier to transfer around, as it is a medium of exchange, but information is the wealth of facebook. The money's just what it can easiest get in exchange. (it could ask for lumber, or any other commodity or service....)

That's a core point I try to raise in a lot of these discussions; that money isn't anything but something to exchange for -other- things.

The point of owning money is to exchange it for something...and outside of an equity market discussion, one shouldn't really look to have more than they need in the slimmest instance...but that becomes difficult.

If by "building a business" you mean stealing an idea, tricking people who hired him to work for them and betraying many of the people who made it possible for him to get started, then yes he seems to like that.

The difference is that Apache wasn't trying to copy the functionality of an extremely popular Microsoft product, they were innovating in a new space that wasn't on Microsoft's radar yet. Open distributed social networking is a great idea, but it will be a hard sell for a while I think, until it hits on some sweet area of functionality that aren't on Facebook's and Twitter's radar yet.

It's how a lot of technological changes roll out.

The spectacle is long over by the time the war is done.

I'm trying to make sense of your statement. It seems to be a tautology. Did you mean the spectacle is long over before people are aware of what happened?

That's certainly the case in anything worth more than a soundbite of reflection. To attack the position of tautology directly, though, 'the war' isn't at all about public awareness, or awareness at all. Its about usage. So, people trying to break facebook get hyped. That's where we're sitting, or just behind where we're sitting. Then the environment changes, the war is won. The war is about, in this case, facebook being forced to play ball with open protocols...not about people becoming aware of that.

That's it in a nutshell.

The media and observers will make acute predictions about how everything will play out. And long after everyone has moved on the "war" continues and sometimes is eventually won. Though it is rare that the the prediction and the end result are the same.

I think Facebook will still be around long after the industry has shifted. Just as Live Journal is still around.

I do not think, that Diaspora will be FB killer for the next, say 5 years. Most people does not really care about big privacy or other things, what Diaspora meant to find solution for. The idea is good, yeah, damn good. However one still need some skills in order to run his own diaspora server or you still need to trust somebody if you put your data on his diaspora server.

Of course the trust connection to your local Diaspora server admin is better then to some unknown very far away Californian FB admins, so this might be a benefit. But you would still need to find a "pub" provider and still would have to decide either you trust him or just go the easy way with FB, where all your friends are already ;)

'The end of', '<insert app/device> killer' and '* considered harmful' articles need better headlines and frankly strikes me as similar to the placard wielding 'end is nigh' crusties.

In the context of the article, the use of "the end of" as a title was purposefully subversive.

Looks like the server can't take the load.

I'm trying to get it back up, we just got a huge rush of traffic.

im a FSF loving anti-capitalist and that read as totally pie in the sky, wishful thinking.

Care to explain why? The essay isn't a statement of inevitability, but instead outlining how the problem is being approached by free software players. It's why, Diaspora's brief place in the limelight aside, there has been no clear "heir to the throne" that has emerged out of free software's challenge to walled gardens, and why there most likely will never be one.

I believe they were being sarcastic.

Michael,

To claim that this project is The End of Facebook is really bold. I know, you need all the attention you can get but sometimes, it's better to take a step back and be realistic about.

You may want to read the article a little more closely. I'm hardly declaring Appleseed a Facebook killer.

If anything, I'm debunking the way tech journalists are clamoring for "the end of Facebook."

Then you might also consider rewording your article's title to reflect the content more accurately.

"SQLSTATE[HY000] [1040] Too many connections"

Cant you speak to rackspace to support you?

  SQLSTATE[08004] [1040] Too many connections

The 'revolution' is off to a great start...

As a non-profit, volunteer, open source project, every donation helps, for obvious reasons.

PS, I'm doing my best to fix it, which may mean upgrading my VPS.

EDIT Back up (for now). I'll continue to monitor it.

EDIT2 I'm resizing the VPS right now. Downtime estimate, approx 12 min.

EDIT3 Done resizing, made some config changes. Hopefully it'll withstand things better now.

Just in case, the full text:

These journalists, they got it all wrong, I tell ya. They’re waiting for a spectacle, where intrepid new entrepreneurs launch an insurgent website (bookface?) and the disaffected masses desert Facebook like rats on a sinking ship. The users are getting restless, that’s for sure, but nobody is sure about the next step.

And so article after article, blog after blog, the tech press looks for their savior. Who will be the next Mark Zuckerburg? Who will build a new empire with an historic trillion dollar valuation? Who is the David willing to challenge Goliath in a pay-per-view televised match to the death?

For a New York minute, it seemed as though Diaspora* was the perfect narrative: Young college students with a dream, the attention of the press and the support of the internet. They had a story, they had the gumption, and they had momentum. All they needed was code.

And therein, as the Bard would tell us, lies the rub: This is not a story of startups and entrepreneurs. This is not a story about who will become the next ~363kg gorilla. This is not a tale of who will next be crowned king.

This is a story about… Wait for it… Server-side software implementations and open, documented protocols.

It’s not easy to write an article about how there won’t be another Facebook. It’s more of a challenge to write an article about how Facebook will be brought down by an RPC or a REST API.

Facebook is a walled garden, and a walled garden is simply a proprietary system in a networked world. To understand how Facebook’s story ends, you have to understand how free software succeeds against it’s non-free competition. There has been some discussion about AOL and CompuServe as a historical precedence, but let’s try another one: Microsoft.

In the before times, in the long, long ago, Microsoft was a juggernaut. IBM before them, but they had won the belt, and wore it loudly. Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft. They had all kinds of ideas about how you would use your computer to search for information, and connect to the world. Very few of their ideas, however, were open.

Around that same time, a handful of developers few had heard of, with no major institutional funding or backing, began work on the Apache web server software. It was free of charge, open source (sorry, Richard, free software), and it worked well. Microsoft tried to compete with IIS, but they had to play by the rules set forth by Apache, which was open protocols in an open web.

Many started hearing about the web, but who heard about Apache? Only those who needed to. It was a quiet revolution, with little attention from the mainstream tech press, and to this day, few users of the web know what Apache is. And yet, Apache served almost 67% of the busiest websites in the world.

Other examples are Joomla! and Drupal, two content management systems that power millions of website. Yet most users have no idea what they are. They don’t have to. They displaced proprietary systems without a dot-com launch party. Another quiet revolution.

Social networking is following these templates. An open, free alternative being built today will quietly replace the walled gardens. Starting with niche communities, building up to institutions like schools and employers, and eventually someone will build a popular hub that gets some press and is touted as the next big thing, although by that point, the “next big thing” will mean something completely different.

At some point, Facebook will decide that they will have to play along, and connect into a decentralized, open social network. Many Facebook users will barely know this has happened, only that some of their friends on their network don’t have an @facebook.com in their profile. Facebook won’t ever die out, but they will have to operate in an eco-system as a player amongst many, respecting open standards, and supporting the open social web, even if they’d rather not.

And that’s when we’ve won.

Michael, just some feedback on your blog. I stopped reading it after .0001 seconds. Why? Text is entirely too small to read. This is coming from a 26 yr old btw, can't imagine what someone older with poor eye sight would say. Not trying to be snarky, hopefully it helps.

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