Ask HN: Will distributed social network work? Are they late? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Will distributed social network work? Are they late?

4 pointssundar22in5 comments

Diaspora and tent.io try to create a distributed social network. Are they late in the game? Will they gain momentum?

I see a huge potential here. For e.g. XMPP is a successful protocol (atleast google adopted). I don't like monopoly, i don't want facebook the only option which everyone must choose (Because its centralized).

Whats your opinion?

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XMPP is not usually peer-to-peer. At least where I've seen it used there is a third party middle man (centralization). Fire up an AWS instance, put your own XMPP server on it, and start your own network with your friends. Just keep polishing it and making it more user friendly. Keep it very simple. Give it some functionality, something simple which everyone wants, that Facebook does not have. Facebook won't disappear overnight, but people do want to try alternatives. People are curious. If you make something really easy to use that offers some useful functionality (think of how simple Instagram is), you will get users who will want to at least try it. You can coexist with Facebook. Facebook will not remain popular forever.

Do this project because you want it for yourself. Because you want decentralization. Scratch your itch. Then share your creation with users.

We are not late with distributed social networks, because the normal user does not care how the system works, just that it works and is easy to use. If you want to beat Facebook you need to beat the user experience of Facebook instead of thinking how to make the internals of social network better. Distributed social network does offer good privacy, but privacy is not enough to compete with Facebook and you can have good privacy settings with centralized social network.

Personally I recently decided to delete my Facebook account because everything was getting annoying to use in Facebook like messages not getting sent, five clicks to remove a friend and other annoying stuff. The Facebook security policy or the ads were not the reason why I left Facebook, but the bad user experience. I felt that I had to do too much stuff to do some simple task like sending a message to a friend.

The problem is that users don't care whether a social network is distributed or not. The overwhelming majority of users don't know what XMPP is, or why they should care.

Also, the lack of a choice is sometimes a good thing. Personally, I don't want my friends to be on 10 different social networks. Facebook isn't perfect, but I like the fact that it is uniform.

It's like email. It should not matter in which social network our friends are, we should be able to communicate with each other.

Imagine that today you can only send email from gmail to gmail account. If that is the state today, won't we think of decentralizing email now?

Having a choice is a good thing, and one size would not fit all.

Spreading your personal data across many vendors is bad idea and average user is aware of this problem. How hard it is to remove data from centralized facebook? It will be a nightmare in case of decentralised networks.

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