On 4 March 2013 03:06, hellekin (GNU Consensus)
<address@hidden> wrote:
On 03/03/2013 08:45 PM, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
>
> Yes, it's unfortunate that facebook will resort to these tactics.
>
*** I cannot find it unfortunate, but rather a normal consequence of
their position. Facebook was never made to empower communities, but to
exploit the social graph, and the contempt of Zuckerberg for his users
is not a secret.
> They have probably have the best adoption and interoperable technology
> in the world, but they dont always use it for good.
>
*** I fear I won't ever be able to agree with you on that topic. I agree
with Jacob Appelbaum and Dmitry Kleiner that Facebook, and most
centralized social networking platforms, that happen to be commercial,
have surveillance as the foundation of their business model.
Sure, but to build a viable alternative, it would be wise to see what
the industry leader has done well, and also, what they have done badly.
Sometimes to be successful, you need to separate ethics from technology. Take the good technology, but reject the bad ethics.
> (well elgg had a good try imho, but 2 devs can only do so much),
> and LAMP has become quite unfashionable these days, so the gap has got
> wider.
>
*** Yes, working with small teams has its drawbacks. But we're trying
with Lorea to upscale our reach to developers. I agree that the
technology is not the best, but as far as PHP is concerned, I think Elgg
offers the best potential for success. Moreover, n-1 benefits from a
strong support base, where inhabitants--as we call "users" have an
exceptional resilience on the network's glitches and flow in for ethical
reasons.
The primary problem is lack of developers.
We could have fixed this 2 years ago, when GNU social and elgg offered to join forces. In fact, the planets were aligning with Tim Berners-Lee helping to advise how to build a scalable web architecture.
Instead GNU made a big bet on OStatus, and has turned out to be unsuccessful. GNU are making the same bet again. Wasn't einstein's definition of insanity, "Doing the same thing again and expecting different results"? :P The GNU Consensus still contains Web 2.0 Advocacy, even to the extent of promoting protocols that you should watch what Eben Moglen had to say about this in 2007.
http://radar.oreilly.com/2007/08/my-tonguelashing-from-eben-mog.htmln-1 was pretty awesome 2 years ago or so, especially with caedes. There is a person that knows web 2.0 and web 3.0 inside out, and is able to take the best parts and put them together. My impression of n-1 is that it has gone backwards -- no more WebID login, the front page seems to be full of weight loss commercials etc. Nevertheless lorea has done some very good work, at least in bringing people together.
Working together with elgg now (if that happens) is perhaps good step, but the gap has widened.
> Given that there are no alternatives people sort of feel trapped in
> facebook, but because all their friends are there, it's hard to leave...
>
*** They are. My take is that fixing the federation for good, and
providing easy access to the code, by packaging it GNU-style, and
shipping it to the major GNU/Linux distros, can provide a space for more
contributions, and better interoperability with other projects. That
position is half of what prompted me to start the GNU/consensus project.
The other half is that I believe there is a path from the current
situation to a fully peer-to-peer solution, given that we can cooperate
over time to ensure seamless convergence.
My mantra for this: localhost, where your social networking belongs.
I've been following this argument for many years :)
I've listened to arguments for P2P solutions, such as psyc etc. for many year. I think there is a case for over inventing, and that's the something facebook didnt do too much of. They simply embraced the web, and then much later, email, and xmpp. But the web came first. I know the urge to create something new is strong, but please dont forget that HTTP was designed to work across federated servers. You may look at
tent.io for some inspiration.
The reason I think this is important in the social networking is because adoption drives the network effect. This is part of the reason for the failure of friendster orkut myspace etc., as pointed out in the original paper. Let's try not to make the same mistakes again, embrace the web in the same way facebook did, dont reinvent, but make it free software.
==
hk