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Comment by pavs | Hacker News Reader

Yes definitely. People who doesn't use facebook by choice are thought of being crazy. I use facebook, for me its a great to keep in touch with my friends and family members who are all over the world. I have a friend who doesn't want to jump in to the facebook bandwagon and our mutual friends thinks he is crazy for not using facebook. The side effect is he almost never gets invited if there is a get together and have no idea whats going with most of our mutual friends. He does have a close group of friends he keeps in touch with (like me, on phone or whatsapp).

I hate facebook's privacy implications, I sympathize with his views. But facebook, the platform, is actually useful to me so I continue to use until a better alternative comes out.

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Have a look at Diaspora

don't waste your time with this, it's an overhyped attempt at being facebook which is not what it should.
have a look at the freedom box instead: https://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/

I'm a big supporter of freedombox - but today you can use a diaspora server operated by someone else, basically no pain. But freedombox is a long ways from a similar no-pain experience.

I have failed to find any list of "known attacks" against diaspora. But I would like to point out a fundamental flaw: What is to stop anyone from setting up a malicious server in diaspora?
Even if I don't trust facebook, I still trust them more than a random individual running a server.
Hopefully there are some solution for this? Perhaps server operators don't actually see any unencrypted data?

The solution is to run your own server. If you want ultimate control, you have to do it yourself, which is painful - and one of the reasons I like freedombox which has, as a goal, to minimize the pain. They just aren't there yet.
The benefit of using a diaspora server operated by someone you trust is the decentralization. Facebook gets EVERYTHING about EVERYBODY, diaspora server operators only get everything about the users on their particular server.

I think they are just splitting up trust to less trust-able entities. Sure, the impact of a malicious entity would be less severe, but the chance of any being malicious is rather big. Cause let's face it, my mom is not going to run her own server, and I believe she has the right to control her data as well as all of us do.
I believe the only way to properly implement a social network is not to trust anyone but your friends. I'm thinking something like a freenet-like apporach, everybody in the network holds a little bit of encypted data, but only the ones you have accepted as friends will be able to see your data unencrypted.

trying to make your non tech friends and family use diaspora is quite problematic. Its a chicken egg problem: social networks need people. people wont join if peoole is not already there

We've been contaminated by greed as a community. We think about building the product that will make us millionnaires when we should be working hard to design consumer tools and protocols that avoid lock-in and promote freedom. We're mislead by people from other spheres that will be the grand winners and leave us with a f-up world and playground. We either build for them or are assimilated by the lure of dollars. Where has the spirit gone ? This isn't what I learnt hacker to mean.

Wow, this is one of the first things I've read on HN to give me pause in a long, long time. Thank you for writing it.

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