I really can't see decentralized social networks being successful. If all hosts are going to be synced the traffic would be huge. If they aren't synced search for both messages and users would be painful. Patching together a stream when the people you follow are scattered across a hundred different servers painful. Account creation for average tech illiterate users painful. If they have to rely on some third party to provide a host, how is that any better than relying on Twitter or Facebook, as soon as the hoster decides it isn't worth the expense or to boot you for some random reason what happens?
Wouldn't it be better to build a centralized message bus and identity system under some kind of foundation like Wikipedia. You would have to get benefactors to fund it is the big problem. Twitter has proved itself to be a priceless service for communication and news streams, its like the real-time Wikipedia.
Its just major regrettable the people who are running it are completely trashing it in the predictable pursuit of the beloved buck and a fat IPO.
I'd love nothing more than foundation based centralized message bus and identity service offering API services to any and all responsible developers and apps, short text only messages and links to avoid all the issues with attachments little or no censorship, private communications between users encrypted so even the foundation can't read them or offer them up to prying governments, some mechanism to control and kill spam.
Because Twitter and Facebook's search features are so great? Twitter doesn't even allow you to search your own tweet history past a certain point.
Patching together a stream when the people you follow are scattered across a hundred different servers painful. Account creation for average tech illiterate users painful.
This is a matter of execution. I think BrowserID is making this a lot easier. Also, we have an example of a decentralized communication system: email.
If they have to rely on some third party to provide a host, how is that any better than relying on Twitter or Facebook, as soon as the hoster decides it isn't worth the expense or to boot you for some random reason what happens?
If it's decentralized, I have more control. I use gmail, but I can keep a backup of my email and change my email provider whenever I want. Not so FB or Twitter.
I think Wikipedia's great, but I think its governance system is pretty whack, and I wouldn't want my communications to be subject to anything that capricious, undemocratic, or otherwise not in my own control.
Not sure about Facebook since I never use it but Twitter's search feature is crippled because Twitter wants it that way. I think they are planning to monetize access to full history, though I dont remember exactly what was being said on this a week or two ago. When it comes to your posts and your stream I think you should be able to search it any way you want and cache it any where you want.
I cite Wikipedia only for the foundation model, funded by contributions, to free us from corporate control, being bombed with ads, and having our personal information harvested for profit.
With a message bus foundation you wouldn't have most of the politics associated with group editing of articles which is where Wikipedia has its worst problems. The only places there would be a risk of politics at the Message Bus Foundation is in terms of use, abuse mitigation, spam filtering, censorship issues and interacting with intrusive government requests. When it comes to privacy and freedom of speech it should be designed to be as private and free as possible.
If all hosts are going to be synced the traffic would be huge. If they aren't synced search for both messages and users would be painful.
Not really - I could see that if you decentralize then you can setup something like a peering scheme between social networks. And if a person wants to find another person on another social network, then perhaps a peering relationship should be setup with that other network, or perhaps that person can migrate to the other network.
It could be practical, but the infrastructure at the moment isn't really there.
If someone is following thousands of people in their stream, and they are scattered across a hundred servers, how do you go about assembling their stream for them in real-time. Is the host server going to have to send user id's for everyone every user based on that server is following, to every server where the people being followed are based, and have every one of those server send all the messages of interest so the host server can build streams for all its users?
Twitter didn't stop sucking reliability wise until they switched to a single persistent user stream connection and abandoned REST most of the time. You really want to have that one persistent connection for a user's stream.
That's a reasonable objection. However, could you get an aggregating server that collects the updates between networks? You might need to batch it, but for networks with better network connectivity it could be done in real time, or close to it.
There is no real need for instantaneous updates, unless the networks so deem it necessary.
Wouldn't it be better to build a centralized message bus and identity system under some kind of foundation like Wikipedia. You would have to get benefactors to fund it is the big problem. Twitter has proved itself to be a priceless service for communication and news streams, its like the real-time Wikipedia.
Its just major regrettable the people who are running it are completely trashing it in the predictable pursuit of the beloved buck and a fat IPO.
I'd love nothing more than foundation based centralized message bus and identity service offering API services to any and all responsible developers and apps, short text only messages and links to avoid all the issues with attachments little or no censorship, private communications between users encrypted so even the foundation can't read them or offer them up to prying governments, some mechanism to control and kill spam.