Anti-Fuckbook campaign!
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For the anti-Fuckbook campaign i’ve now joined Diaspora, Friendica, MeWe etc.
Diaspora and Friendica are sure to be free software backed, that we all can trust them. (Also Mastodon, but limits the length each post, due to their nature being a ‘‘little’’ social service :( )
For MeWe, they also have campaigned for anti-Fuckbook, anti-ads, anti-sales etc, but unsure for free software backed or not. You are welcome to test for MeWe than feed back to me here. :)
Fuckbook has been being suffered agianst the most serious insecurity, just saving passwords as plain text files without encyptions, i now have no expectations on Fuckbook, and is now ready for my life-long online social life on the free software friendly social networks. At least they have to prevent us against the annoying features and the insecurities.
From what I've read, MeWe is all proprietary code. Here is their statement on twitter from August, 2018: "Open source hasn't worked well for the few that have tried. MeWe is advised by Raj Sisodia, founder of Conscious Capitalism + Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Inventor of the Web. Decentralization is the answer - we are on it! We will make censoring and data collecting social media obsolete!" https://twitter.com/mewe/status/1026993104694345728
You might want to check into the new Pondemome project. It aims to be fully open source with end-to-end encryption: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/pondenome-the-end-to-end-encrypted-social-network#/
> "Open source hasn't worked well for the few that have tried."
This is blatant lie. Here are some disconfirming examples:
https://www.coactivate.org/projects/disintermedia/for-profit-freedom-forges
> "Decentralization is the answer - we are on it!"
I can't see how this is possible without liberating the code, so a range of vendors can run instances, as in the fediverse. Maybe they plan to federate with other services using a standard set of protocols? XMPP? ActivityPub? Zot? Matrix? Something else?
WeMe appears to be the next Ello (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/14/goodbye-ello-google-seacrhes-social-network), just a way of harvesting a pool of users to attract VC funding, and then sell their users to one of the big datafarming corporations in an acquisition, or to corporate shareholders in an IPO. Or, like OpenBook (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1520156881/openbook-the-honest-open-source-and-awesome-social/description), it's a bunch of well-meaning beginners trying to repeat Diaspora's crowdfunding success, without understanding the technical, social, and financial challenges involved in delivering the service they are promising.
> You might want to check into the new Pondemome project.
Will it be designed to inter-operate with anything other than itself, using common standards like those mentioned above?
People pitching federated (micro-)blogging apps like Diaspora, GNU social, and Mastadon as replacements for FB do not understand what FB is. It's not primarily a social media platform, although some people use it that way. It's mainly used for keeping in touch with a social network of people the user already knows. Its killer apps are not the public comment system, but FB Messenger, and the events system, that allows people to announce events to their social network (private or public) and collect RSVPs and comments.
Replacing FB for a group of users requires figuring out what features they actually need (Chat? Events? Social media? Something else?), and pitching a tool or set of tools that address their particular use case. Trying to design a unified web platform that does everything, for everyone, gratis, is how ended up with FB and the rest of the datafarms. I know of no ethical platform that does everything FB does under a single set of login credentials, and I'm sceptical about whether such a thing will ever exist.
Why are you sceptical about such a thing will ever exist?
What is so unthinkable about this exact thing?
Ever is a long time. But in the near term, he's almost certainly right. Putting together such a massive project will need a lot of money, and the people who will want to invest that kind of money are the ones who will want to turn users' private data into an asset for sale.
Here's what I think would be required to create a libre replacement for FarceBook.
First, we'd need a large-scale, crowdsourced UX design project. This would involve current FB users explaining exactly what features they use and how they use them, and a group of designers gradually building up mockups of a replacement UX. The designers would go through a number of iterations of presenting their mockups to the users for feedback and tweaking their designs in response. The outcome of this project would be a coherent UX design for both a website and native apps for desktop and mobile platforms.
During the course of the UX design project, a list of required features/ functions would need to be compiled. Decisions would need to be made about which of these could be implemented on the client-side (as many as possible, particularly data storage) and which would need remote servers. The second part of the project would involve identifying which of the features required by the UX could be implemented using existing free code components, which ones would need new code, and how the whole service could fit together efficiently. This would be a complicated set of decisions, because although building completely from scratch would be reinventing the wheel, the alternative requires evaluating hundreds or thousands of potential dependencies for code quality, and how likely it is to be maintained effectively in the long term.
The third part of the project, once the choices about initial design and back-end component re-use/ development had been made, would be to put the whole thing together as a proof-of-concept service. At this point, people who participated in the original crowdsourced UX design project could be contacted to see if they would like to be beta testers. Again, there would need to be a number of iterations where the service and UI was tweaked in response to tester feedback.
Unless there was some way to create an entirely serverless system, during the prototyping phase some serious thought would need to be given to how to provision servers the production services will rely on. Our experiences with the fediverse so far have shown that we can't just rely on random people setting up instances, which may vanish without a trace at any time. If the FB-replacement ties users to a domain name, as the ActivityPub fediverse does, there will need to reliable organizations running instances (like cooperative businesses, associations with paid membership, or well-funded charities). It would be better if it used Zot (like Hubzilla and Zap), configured in such a way that every user's account exists on at least two instances at any given time, so if one goes down, the account is automatically copied from the surviving one to another one. But in the absence of a serverless system like Jami, the long-term organizational and financial durability of instances is a problem that needs to be solved before federated social networks are ready for mainstream use.
Once the alpha and beta phase of prototyping was finished, and a stable 1.0 release of both the client-side apps and server-side software was available that included tools for importing users' data from their FB account, there would need to be a massive organizational and promotional effort to get reliable instances set up, and convince groups of users to set up accounts and start using them.
Some might say I'm making this seem way more complicated than it needs to be. After all, we've already created a federated replacement for the birdsite. But my whole point is that FB is a much more complicated system to replace and people are much more dependent on it.
The birdsite has only two features, a public micro-blog (short text messages published on the web), and private text messages, and the fediverse as a whole has only implemented the first one. Some fediverse apps have "private" messages, but they don't yet federate reliably across all apps and most (eg the Mastodon/ Pleroma DMs or "direct messages") are private only in the sense they are not displayed publicly on those platforms. DMs sent to servers running other fediverse apps are liable to just treat them like any other public post. Only servers running Zot apps have any kind of encryption or proper controls over private messages and media.
FB consists of a wide range of features; not just posts, but an event system, encrypted realtime chat (including voice/ video), photo-sharing and galleries, web video and video livestreaming, pages, groups, and more. Many of these features have both public and private versions. While FB's privacy protection is far from exemplary, a system being promoted as an ethical replacement would need to take this seriously. Many existing free code projects offer some of the elements needed to create a FB replacement, but none of them are anywhere near incorporating them all, and the problem of hosting remains unsolved.
In summary, I'm sceptical because I think that rather than replacing FB with a single service, I think we're more likely to succeed by disaggregating its features, replacing them with apps that do one thing well; chat clients, media-hosting services, events systems etc, and finding ways to bundle them together into hosted services, and make them inter-operate widely.
> In summary, I'm sceptical because I think that rather than replacing FB with a single service, I think we're more likely to succeed by disaggregating its features, replacing them with apps that do one thing well; chat clients, media-hosting services, events systems etc, and finding ways to bundle them together into hosted services, and make them inter-operate widely.
I agree with this, and I would add that even a complete reimplementation of every FB feature with flawless UX would not be enough to address the network effect. Google tried and failed, even with their resources and existing Gmail userbase. The social challenge of building a community is as much if not more of an obstacle than any technical challenge. If someone were to implement an ActivityPub-compatible event system right now, I don't think it would catch on.
As you point out, we have had more success replacing the birdsite (or Shitter as I sometimes call it) than Farcebook. I think that this is largely because, while people use Facebook to communicate mostly with people they know in real life, they frequently use Twitter to communicate with strangers. The fediverse seems to be reaching a size where it is useful as a Twitter-like network. I have been particularly encouraged to see the emergence of non-geek communities like Switter and Humblr on Mastodon.
Since a Facebook replacement seems out of reach at this point, but Mastodon and ActivityPub have some momentum, my strategy would be to continue pushing ActivityPub as a free network for talking to strangers, until hopefully the userbase reaches the density needed for many users to know at least a few other users in real life. At that point, ActivityPub-compatible reimplementations of some of Facebook's features (particularly the event system) might have a chance of catching on and replacing the use of Facebook for some of those features.
>Mastodon and ActivityPub have some momentum,
source?
> >Mastodon and ActivityPub have some momentum,
> source?
Mastodon launched two years ago, and in that time I have seen numerous articles about them outside of FLOSS blogs and news sites, and recently some non-FLOSS communities like Humblr and Switter have been migrating to Mastodon from Tumblr and Twitter respectively. Compare that to Diaspora, an attempt to replace Facebook, which has been around for almost a decade and yet has fewer users than Mastodon and which I never see discussed outside of FLOSS circles.
Chaosmonk:
>> Mastodon and ActivityPub have some momentum,
Masaru:
> source
Some statistics on fediverse user numbers can be found at number of monitoring sites including:
http://the-federation.info/
https://fediverse.network/
I've been contributing to a full list of monitoring sites on the fediverse.party wiki:
https://gitlab.com/fediverse/fediverse.gitlab.io/wikis/instance-monitoring-sites
Chaosmon:
>> If someone were to implement an ActivityPub-compatible event system right now, I don't think it would catch on.
There are a number of projects working on this:
https://socialhub.network/t/federated-events/226
Mobilizon and GetTogether are event-based projects. There are various other projects in the works. Friendica now supports AP and has an events engine, although there are mixed reports about whether event federation over AP is working properly. Federated calendar sharing is in the works for NextCloud too. It's not certain whether this will support AP, but given they now have a Social client that does, I think it will become a priority when there are definitely other working AP events instances to federate with.
FYI I've been contributing to a list of AP apps too, it's been fascinating to watch the growing interest and see apps go from proposal to beta to working AP federation:
https://gitlab.com/fediverse/fediverse.gitlab.io/wikis/watchlist-for-activitypub-apps
>Mastodon and ActivityPub have some momentum,
source?
Why are you sceptical about such a thing will ever exist?
What is so unthinkable about this exact thing?
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