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You say decentralized services never work, and then give an example of the most successful one: email.

I don't know why you are assuming that everyone will have to run their own.

Also, it seems very cynical/naive to think that just because such systems aren't currently working/won't currently work with given social structures, that this will always be the case. Do you disagree?

Email essentially IS centralized at DNS. Any decentralized social network has to solve the lookup problem: how do I find people. None really do this in a way that's going to make it fundamentally different than what we have now.

I can't help feeling that the natural outcome of decentralized social networking is that people eventually start hosting them for mom and dad, then a few friends, then start companies, then we are back to facebook. Someone, somewhere is going to have to have a database of names mapped to servers.

Centralization is, in an abstract way, present in so many of our social structures, that yes, I disagree that within a capitalist economic structure (one which is optimized for sharing of services rather than individualism, ie: non-technical users simply wont do this unless the work is done for them, like facebook did) it would be next to impossible for something like this to work.

People quite simply don't want to deal with this shit, and centralization brings efficiency and management amongst many other things.

Email is a decentralized service and the task of discovery is solved with DNS. If you have an address, jackalope@example.com, you can find out where to send the message if it is explicitly set (MX record) or not (A record). I don't see why you can't do the same with a decentralized social network.

And who runs the DNS servers?

The most popular ones are run by IANA, ICANN, and Verisign.

But nothing stops most of us in the free world from choosing an alternative root system. Other than the support cost of a minor config change in our OS or application software.

Or mymail@[127.0.0.1]

Email essentially IS centralized at DNS.

The difference between DNS and Facebook/Twitter is that DNS is regulated so that bad guys have to go through some kind of due process to shut down your domain. It's not perfect, but it's better than what else we've got.

AKAIK it is still possible with most popular email servers to send and recive using only IP addresses (e.g. by placing the address in brackets).

DNS is really only optional for email, at least functionally. But I think a lot of people assume there can be no email without domain names.

So why not regulate facebook and twitter instead of make another service that will essentially turn into DNS, which we already have?

Facebook and Twitter were funded under the assumption that they would be unregulated monopolies, so regulating them amounts to stealing from their investors.

Instead of another service that will essentially turn into DNS, I would propose just using DNS for naming. So if you're Tyler Durden you register tyler.durden.name and put an A record pointing to your DiSo server. Now you can switch providers while retaining your identity by just changing the A record.

Exactly, no matter how decentralized is the infrastructure, there always has a centralized node, such as BitTorrent tracker.

BitTorrent is capable of being decentralized from day one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_tracker#Trackerless_...

Why it wasn't be?

    The original BitTorrent client was the first to offer decentralized [...]

Is not the same as "from day one"

Not only is email a successful decentralised system, it's the logical infrastructure for a decentralised social network. In Facebook terms, your "feed" is just an inbox with a smart filter and nice presentation, and your "wall" is just a mailing list to which all of your friends are subscribed.

This is so profoundly true. It's all just feeds. RSS could have been implemented as mailing lists, too. Maybe we should use mailing lists to build the next big decentralized social network instead of this infrastructure.

Wait, wasn't RSS invented to replace mailing lists (aka news letters)?

But yeah, making a facebook/twitter-style social network app that uses plain email as transport would be really cool.

> Wait, wasn't RSS invented to replace mailing lists (aka news letters)?

Probably. On the server-side RSS is nicer in some respects - you're not sending out mail to old, disused inboxes, you don't have to manage subscriptions or worry about being blocked as spam etc.

One thing that I think might make email better is if people got used to the idea of "email apps". The idea that my inbox might collate stories from a given source into a scannable digest (like RSS might give me) seems like a strange departure from the traditional idea of what an email client or service is "meant to do" - present discrete, unmodified messages in the most transparent way possible.

For a social network it's clear that you'd need something like that, though - you'd need clever filters on your feed, thumbnails on images, possible integration with image-sharing services etc etc. Using email and mailing lists gives you a big head-start, but if you can't build on top of it then it can't take off like a dedicated protocol can.

XMPP has this neat feature that allows you to know what features are supported by a remote client, allowing you to just send social stuff to online clients that want it. Email doesn't have this, but it could be approximated by some clever use of multipart messages. It'd be even better with filters, but you can't count on things like sieve being available.

I'll just leave this here http://mobisocial.stanford.edu/papers/hotpets11.pdf First sentence of the abstract: "This paper proposes Mr. Privacy, a social application framework built on top of email..."

Exactly right. Very few people want the hassle of running their own email server. It happens I am the kind of person that likes running his own email server. I run my mail server in such a way that it is appealing to many of my friends to host their email accounts with me. Many other people find their accounts with gmail, or their ISP or their business. These are ALL examples of the success of our decentralized email system. Individuals, small businesses, and large business can all enter the market, offer advantageous features, compete on price, etc.

Facebook is the opposite of this. I have no option to build my own site for facebook style networking. I have no option to subscribe to Google's implementation of a general social networking protocol.

> That's why I trust my mail hosting to Google.

Imagine if GMail only allowed you to send Google Mail(TM) to other @gmail.com addresses. Email's decentralization allows us to ignore the fact that other people may be reading on an iphone, yahoo mail, or emacs.

Decentralization isn't (only) for neckbeards. It's about giving users freedom to socialize with those who choose a different client. Isn't it bizarre that I use LinkedIn, you use Facebook, therefore we can't be friends?

First we build the decentralized social network, then I will decide if I want to social network with you via google, yahoo, or emacs.

ISPs hosted email servers for individuals for years. I don't know why hosting a social networking server for Customers would be any different. I don't know enough about the tent.io API to decide how I feel about it, but I think that history with SMTP, NNTP, etc, shows that decentralized protocols with servers hosted by a diversity of third-parties (instead of a single Facebook, Google+, etc) can work.

We are launching a hosted version very soon, and expect others to as well.

I would think ISPs would love to host folk's social network servers. Just think of all the social data they'd have at their disposal for whatever they could use it for.

I can't understand how you say that decentralized systems can never work, then point to e-mail as an example of doing it right. E-mail is the classic decentralized communication system!

Except, as GP points out, the vast expansion of the email system was followed by a huge number of users running to GMail and a huge number of domains running to Google Apps and other hosted platforms. My parents don't run mail servers. My employer no longer runs a mail server (outsourced to a common third-party provider), and I used to run a mail server but I gave up on it and fell back on Google Apps when I needed one. Running a mail server is a huge pain and once centralized systems became available (Hotmail, then Gmail and Google Apps) most users fell back on them.

Even a situation where 99% of people use a handful of providers is a lot more free than everyone being forced to use a single provider.

This. And if you put just a tiny bit of effort into it and own your own domain you can switch providers at any time for little effort. A world of difference from the Facebook trap.

"Decentralized" don't mean outsourced vs self-hosted. It just means there isn't a central/core part of a network that everything relies on. Outsourcing of decentralized systems is very popular (see: email, web hosting, DNS, etc.)

Yes. I think most people miss this. For peer-to-peer to succeed I think there needs to be some amount of "re-education". There needs to be a shift in thinking. Many of these things that others are doing for you (email, etc.) can just as easily run from your machine instead of theirs. You do not need the same capacity and ability to scale as they do.

What makes it all possible is NAT traversal. That is the fundamental problem being solved which takes us back to peer-to-peer and the orginal model of the internet. The rest is all just pre-configuration and UI.

I think NAT traversal is actually only one part of P2P becoming successful. Between UDP hole punching, uPNP, and other techniques you can cover a pretty large percentage of users.

The harder part, to me, is distributed trust in the discovery phase. Without a central authority it's really hard to ensure authenticity, fight spam, etc.

IPv6 is going to solve that.

RetroShare is afaik completely decentralized private social network. Although it's security design isn't as good as I would wish it to be. Good network uses PKI and all data being transferred or at rest is secured. This also means that service providers can't be held responsible.

Many decentralized plans allow still operators to soop in network parts which they're operating. If there's separate client, why not to make sure that system is secure?

I don't know a lot about RetroShare but from what little I know I think they actually had the right approach. It was real peer-to-peer.

I'm not thinking about peer-to-peer from an anonymous file sharing perspective. I'm thinking in much broader terms. But I know anonymous file sharing is what many projects have focused on.

You are right that many puported "peer-to-peer" solutions are not true p2p. Look hard and you'll usually find a middleman somewhere in the scheme. Of course as we all know many users are not really interested in how something works, just so long as it works. How many people really look hard at the scheme being used?

As for IPv6, I think it brings a lot of complexity. And where there is complexity, there will be problems. Working with IPv4 is complex enough as it is. I like IPv4 because it's more widely found. Not everyone will have access to IPv6.

I really don't think it's as big an issue as people make it.

People commenting about this in lists and forums and blogs make the issue more complex than it is because they have all sorts of assumptions about how it has to work. But as Rob Pike says when you assume you put plum paste on your ass. "Discovery phase." This is nerd stuff.

Put all the nerd stuff aside for a moment. When you want to telephone someone, how to you handle the "discovery phase"? You look up the telephone number and place the call. Everyone does this the world over. Second, how many people do you actually telephone in your entire lifetime? Hundreds? Thousands? (Are you a telemarketer?) Third, how many of them are people you see face-to-face at some point? People do not normally call lots of anonymous people.

A telephone network. (Actually a system of regional networks.) Everyone has a number. You get their number and you make the call. But how? According to nerds on the web, this should be a complex problem with no easy solution. But millions of people, non-technical people, make telephone calls everyday.

To think the web equivalent of a telephone directory is an unsolvable problem is ridiculous. And to think that every person needs a directory with billions of names is similarly silly. They will only need a small subset.

Moreover, with modern storage capacities, you could store a billion names and numbers on a small device no problem. Searching billion row databases is quite fast, if you use the right software. But you will never even need to go that far.

AFAIK people do not change their telephone numbers very frequently. Certainly not on a whim. If they do change it, then they have to let others know. Somehow they manage this., even if they are non-tecnical. Of course if you keep changing your number you'll be harder to contact. This ic common sense. But why would you do that? Why would you need to keep changing your number? Get a number and stick to it.

If you think stuff like MobileIP is the solution to roaming then you need to keep looking at what's possible. There are simpler and more reliable ways to do it.

How many people do you call in a lifetime? Think about it.

I meant "discovery phase" in the broader sense of locating people and content around you, making sure that they are who they say they are, and that they have the content that you want. Less about keeping track of where to reach someone and more about trust.

If you're thinking 'p2p' as skype is 'p2p', then fine, a directory service is easy to build. You just set up a centralized service to handle lookup, collision disputes, spam fighting, etc. Then when the centralized registry decides it wants everyone to start using their real names, we're back to where we started.

Lastly, you're right that the average person only calls a handful of people. But this is not the 1970s phone network, this is the internet. It's a different communication medium with different rules. Your HN account was created one day ago and has no contact information. The chances I could call you up on the phone are basically zero, yet somehow we're having a conversation.

> Then when the centralized registry decides it wants everyone to start using their real names, we're back to where we started.

Not really. Directory lookup should use a standardized API so that when one directory service goes rouge, clients can just switch to another they trust.

I do think that it's essential for this to be standardized. Not only for this reason, but clients/hosts shouldn't be forced with the responsibility of indexing the entire social web themselves.

If it's standardized with multiple providers then either a) you can't communicate with people who have switched to a different directory service or b) it's no longer centralized. :)

"This is not ... this is the internet."

That is exactly the type of conceptual roadblock I was alluding to in my comment.

But if you look at what people, not just nerds, want to do over the internet a significant portion (perhaps even the majority) of it is the same old stuff they did in 1970's. Send person-to-person messages and make person-to-person telephone calls.

The new dimension is of course person-to-person video, and we now have more ubiquitous bandwidth to make this happen that we didn't have in the 1990's.

Whether you see possibilities or just impediments depends on how you define the problem.

If you define the problem as achieving some sort of perfectly anonymous communication, an anonyous interchange of bits, then you are outside of the problem I'm discussing. It may be a fascinating problem, but it is not one that interests me.

I'm talking about doing those same old things we were doing in the 1970's, with the same degree of privacy we had (absence of advertisements and senseless statistical analysis of every word we say for commercial purposes), using the internet.

Millions of people manage to call their friends and family despite the issues of "discovery phase" and "trust". Millions of people have a connetion to a telephone network despite the potential of "spam" (cold calling? telemarketing?)

Again, if you redefine the problem your own way++ you can argue endlessly against any sort of simple proposal, e.g. one that aims to make something we've all been doing since the 1970's easy, for everyone, not just nerds: connecting, directly, to people you know.+++ Facebook seems to revolve around the idea of communicating with people ("friends") you know in real life, not online acquaintences you have never met. Is that the reason it's popular? I don't know. And I don't really care. Even if there was no such thing as a "social network" (buzzword), I see a utility in being able to stay in contact with people I know in real life. I fail to see Facebook, which is roughly the real world equivalent of a megaphone, as being necessary to do that. Why do I have to route all by bits through Facebook's website? The answer is: I don't. And NAT traversal is the solution.

++ We need a way to have anonymous communication with strangers. As other commenters have said, that problem is for the cypherpunks.

+++ And I'm pretty sure this is how the very early internet was, before firewall mania and NAT. People had met the others they were connecting to in real life. Or, at least, they had their real life contact information and could pick up the phone and call them, or send them a letter.

Do you honestly believe that "most users" use GMail and Hotmail? Most users use an ISP, but lots and lots of companies host their own mail, sometimes for good legal reasons. It would be interesting to know if Microsoft sells more Exchange licenses to hosting companies, but I don't think so.

So what? E-mail is still decentralized. That most people don't host it themselves is a completely unrelated concept.

Gmail does not have as large of a market share as you think: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/will-it-work/email-...

In general this is a common misconception at HN and in similar circles: Gmail may be ubiquitous among the tech crowd, but it's far from clear that it's even in first place among webmail providers.

I cannot run my own mail server without significant extra expense, because the assholes who run Spamhaus decide every Comcast IP must be blocked. So over the last 10 years or so, it's become much harder to keep email decentralized--you either need to use an existing service, or pay out the nose for a "business-class" connection which hopefully won't be blocked.

Decentralized is not the same as self-hosted.

I just started to (self)host my email servers two weeks ago. I'm very happy with it.

I'd be very interested to hear about your experiences--what kind of net connection you have, static or dynamic IP, what software you're running, etc.

I disagree. The software will get easier over time until it is literally plug-and-play. But it won't happen without projects like this happening.

This. It's easy to assume that software will be hard to configure forever. We just have to not let that happen. Lots of people manage to set up their routers, right? How much more complicated does this need to be?

Exactly. iOS and Android are based on Unix but they're easy to use. There's nothing stopping the same thing from being done to servers.

> There's nothing stopping the same thing from being done to servers.

Wordpress.

Wordpress takes a simple thing (One-way flow of text from author to reader) and makes it easy. It could be a lot harder to deal with something where information was going both ways.

A very important part of an interactive webpage is how it changes over time and with different inputs. Web developers have no trouble looking at some example widgets and imagining all the possible things a user could make them look like, but most people (might) have trouble doing that.

The same thing, I imagine, applies to running servers. I only know a bit about operating servers, but from my experience there is a complete, unremovable complexity that comes with having a powerful set of tools. Perhaps, we could remove almost all the configurability from the instant-server kit, but then why would you want to run your own?

Perhaps, we could remove almost all the configurability from the instant-server kit, but then why would you want to run your own?

Freedom. e.g. being allowed to use a pseudonym or post breastfeeding photos.

Lots of people manage to set up their routers, right?

Because they have to. Don't set up a router? Don't get an internet connection. It's like how people manage to put their tax in.

The barrier for entry needs to be much, much lower than setting up a router, otherwise it'll just be passed over in favour of something else, like Facebook.

(This, though, like the internet, changes when you reach critical mass. Then barrier for entry can be higher without impacting uptake much.)

So decentralized email (you know, "email") doesn't work?

Your mom/sister/dad/cousin are going to use a service that allows them to post status updates, instead of just using Twitter. Just like your mom/sister/dad/cousin use Gmail for email, and not their own server.

I'd say "my mom/sister/dad/cousin" is not going to host this themselves is a tricky assumption. I can imagine a world where my mom creates an account with a service that kicks off an EC2 instance on her behalf without her even knowing it. Want to build a facebook that scales cheaply? Make every user bring their own server. On top of that, make "bringing a server" as easy as a registration process.

Though I believe the idea is that Tent be more like an email server: email hosts are able to offer their own features and interfaces, yet remain interoperable with one another.

Most people don't host their own email service, but most people do benefit from using email – and the best part of it is that there's no monolithic Email Inc. that could someday go bankrupt and bring everyone's emailing days to a close.

I would be willing to pay for a hosted version of a decentralized network that respect my privacy. Decentralized is important to me not because I want to run my server, but because this mean I can switch providers or choose to run my server if I want.

Plus, it's really just an advanced version of email. I mean, you could build a fancy social network on top of SMTP. And SMTP is decentralized, so I don't see any reason why this shouldn't work.

Regarding Diaspora, it seems that tent.io is starting with the protocol instead of the frontend, which seems more promising to me.

Remember Skype? It's very much peer-to-peer, with various node types, third-party traffic forwarding, encryption end to end, QoS issues to manage, NATs and firewalls to handle, etc.

Did you try to install a recent Skype version? Download an executable, run, enter your login and password, and it just works.

Execution matters, you know.

The existing decentralized software out there (except for maybe bitcoin which is actually quite simple and a couple others) are not sufficient for normal people because of the way they are presented. Diaspora failed horribly because it was hard to use on your own system. That and it was rather scrambled at launch. The code was horrible.

If there was a system that acts like current centralized systems out there it wouldn't be a matter of it being hard. The technology is becoming easier and easier.

If presented properly, there is no reason a decentralized system couldn't attract normal people.

Facebook and Google make it appear that what you are using is actually on your system. That you control the information. Yet, the so called "small" price of that is you have to give away personal information to them.

With a system that is completely decentralized and secure and keeps people's privacy while being so easy to use that my Mother can use it w/out problem, centralized systems would be in danger.

So yes, the current way of doing things is for geeks. That will change with projects like Tent. Centralized services will ultimately fail simply because of the violations to peoples privacy are starting to really piss people off. Normal people. Like me.

If I want to share my music playlist with my friends, I should be able to do it. I also don't like being censored and watched, which is exactly what these systems do. Don't believe me? Search it. And if you don't mind that type of thing for convenience, then I'm not sure you understand freedom.

And by the way, those "neckbeards" are the ones who are going to set things straight. A decentralized system doesn't necessarily have "servers". Everyone will be their own type of server.

my mom/sister/dad/cousin are not going to host this themselves. They might depend on me to do it, but even I'm not going to run a decentralized social network myself. There's too much liability involved. Not to mention, it's a pain in the ass.

That's not the point. Those aren't the ones decentralization benefits. Decentralization will benefit other organizations, such government agencies, companies, non-profits, NGOs, etc. These organizations most likely have other services running on either their own infrastructure or they have some one else paid to host it. They benefit by retaining control of the namespace and ability to post a message without relying on a centralized service.

I think that an open protocol for social networking could really take off. Different hosting companies could offer different services for the same underlying protocol. Some hosts may offer free hosting with advertisements, while others may offer the service without adds for a monthly rate, etc. Ideally, if people were unhappy with a hosting company, they could migrate their data to a different host. I like the comparison of a protocol like this to a protocol like email. I really believe that social networking should be a protocol and not an exclusive service owned by other companies.

Diaspora has some similarities with Tent, but there are a lot of differences between Tent and Diaspora.

Many people thought the same about live journal and Blogger in the early 2000's, then Wordpress came along. This (and diaspora) are Wordpress for social network profiles.

Decentralized protocols seem to work well for things like email and web sites though. I think the idea is that most people will use a provider to run the server, but it is possible/easy to switch between providers. The lack of lock-in and network effects at the provider specific level mean that competition can do its thing and people won't have to put up with shenanigans like retroactive privacy changes a-la Facebook.

Exactly.

There is a reason we don't dispose of our own garbage. It's just worth paying some one else (plus efficiencies of scale). Infrastructure like social network is garbage. People don't wanna deal with it, don't care how it works, and are glad to externalize the cost. They just want their waste to magically disappear. Or, to maintain / increase their social status with friends and family.

And there's also IRC as an example of a decentralized service that is still alive.

Are you high?

This might be (just a little) too pessimistic.

The sweet spot both Tent and Diaspora are/were aiming for is one where most users use somebody else's service, but a few crazy neckbeards choose to self-host.

The neckbeards who actually care (often quite unreasonably) about privacy, etc, provide a very useful service to the ordinary users - they keep the central service(s) honest, ie, keep them from turning into Facebook. Because it's possible to escape, because the neckbeards keep that possibility open, the ordinary users are not captured.

At least, that's the theory. Diaspora didn't execute on it. Tent, well, we'll see.

I agree. This is like Usenet, or further back the old Fidonet days where most people accessed through a small local hub, but you still had the nutty people who ran their own node.

Make it easy for people to participate casually, but also make sure that people can customize to their liking and exert full control over their own stuff if they wish to, without causing trouble to the rest of the network.

No, nodes were usually BBS systems. If you wanted to use same protocol, then you did run your own point usually. Of course there were a few sysops with their own nodes. But Point was the usual way of personally joining the network using official protocols. Of course most did use qwk and bluewave etc to get messages quickly without setting up systems without mandatory zone mail hour etc. Didn't you run your own point / node? ;)

You're right, I got my terminology mixed up (it's been a while heh).. Point is what I meant.. Thanks. :-)

SPOT ON CHAP.

This is truly, exactly it. I don't expect my mother or friend to run a Tent server. But imagine Facebook were a Tent/Diaspora host. People would have left in DROVES by now if another, somewhat equal host could migrate their data in and provide better user respect.