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Comment by tomxor | Hacker News Reader

> your definition of a state of privacy will be my definition: the effective capacity to misrepresent yourself.

This is true of the world we live in today, which comprises of almost completely centralised services. But in the future, I believe the second option will be: building and using local FOSS replacements for those services.

Many of those local replacements will need no communication at all - So many things that run off a server today have no functional need to, it's about control. Others are more difficult, because communication is inherent to the service, and centralization is the simplest and most obvious choice when being provided by a coorporation, so an infamous "decentralised" solution is needed, which are more difficult to create, organise and promote.

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What is the local FOSS replacement for Facebook and Instagram? It is not inherent in the notion of communicating publicly and privately using photos, videos and short text messages than I disclose some ungodly amount of private data. I have feel like writing some protocol and a few clients and servers, but I expect that there's already twenty four competing protocols that no-one uses because, if you're not the biggest, you're noone.

Yes, as I said in my last sentence:

> Others are more difficult, because communication is inherent to the service, and centralization is the simplest and most obvious choice when being provided by a coorporation, so an infamous "decentralised" solution is needed, which are more difficult to create, organise and promote.

I think the only way a decentralised social network replacement will win out facebook is with a universal but progressive/gracefully degrading protocol is created as the single way lots of different clients/federated servers etc communicate, a protocol that also allows greater level of control over where your data goes... i.e email but better.

As i said these problems are the most difficult, but there are a lot of thing being "clouded" at the moment that have no need, those are the low hanging fruit.

Note that I am suggesting FOSS is the preferred option to obfuscating, rather than the only option... some services will always be centralised not only because it's simpler but because it's about/for a central authority... for those obfuscation is the only way.

It's not 'local', but the FOSS replacement for Facebook/Instagram is email.

There is no alternative, because facebook isn't just "a protocol and some clients/servers". As long as it's -the- social network to be on, then it will always be just that. You can't compete with social culture just with mere programming.

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