Revisiting Open Source Social Networking Alternatives 88
reifman writes Upstart social networking startup Ello burst on the scene in September with promises of a utopian, post-Facebook platform that respected user's privacy. I was surprised to see so many public figures and media entities jump on board — mainly because of what Ello isn't. It isn't an open source, decentralized social networking technology. It's just another privately held, VC-funded silo. Remember Diaspora? In 2010, it raised $200,641 on Kickstarter to take on Facebook with "an open source personal web server to share all your stuff online." Two years later, they essentially gave up, leaving their code to the open source community to carry forward. In part one of "Revisiting Open Source Social Networking Alternatives," I revisit/review six open source social networking alternatives in search of a path forward beyond Facebook.
If it helps: (Score:2)
Your personal information is now essentially open source, thanks to facebook.
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How can Facebook get personal information that you don't voluntarily share with it?
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How? I've been on Facebook for years and haven't seen anything like that.
The only thing my friends can do is tag me in pictures, which can be easily disabled or individually untagged.
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Thats nice, except Facebook tags them anyway because of their use of facial recognition.
Often quite poorly as people tag other people's children as the parents or people get tagged in photos they just want to send a notification about. That's why facebook does such a crappy job of identifying people in photos I post.
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Yeah, but they have the corpus, so in N years, when the algorithm improves, overnight revolution.
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A friend of mine uploaded a slightly blurry, low quality picture with about ten people in it recently. It auto-detected everyone but me, and the only reason it didn't detect me is that I do not have a facebook profile.
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No, not as poorly as you think.
I'm not sure you understand how it works, it learns based on the photos you are tagged in so when people are tagged as their children or as different people in photos they want to draw attention to it gets pretty flakey which is why it rarely gets it right with me and my friends. Obviously it works well if you are only tagged in pictures of yourself.
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Thats nice, except Facebook tags them anyway because of their use of facial recognition.
I can't imagine somebody on Facebook posting a picture that includes me. Possibly this is because I have no social life.
Re:If it helps: (Score:4, Insightful)
At least in the US a lot of "personal information" can be obtained from public sources. And with Facebook's tendrils into other sites (with things like beacons and such) they can probably get a surprising amount of information from sources you wouldn't expect.
Install Ghostery sometimes and see how many websites you log in to every day have beacons that go to a Facebook-affiliated site.
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What friends? I'm a programmer, damn it!
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How can Facebook get personal information that you don't voluntarily share with it?
Offline data collection:
Tracking your browsing:
Getting tentacles in your OS:
Running analytics software and servers for other websites and apps:
Etc.
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Re: We are the Facebook. (Score:1)
Re: Upstart (Score:1)
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So, what is your business plan to attain the popular uptake necessary to achieve the network effects required to make it viable? The technical challenges to create a social networking site are relatively trivial - in terms of user-facing functionality Facebook isn't *that* much different from the BBSes of yore. Decentralization makes things more interesting, but the real challenge is to make it culturally (and economically) viable.
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Those who do not understand Usenet are doomed to reinvent it, poorly.
what it is and isn't doesn't matter to the public (Score:3)
I was surprised to see so many public figures and media entities jump on board — mainly because of what Ello isn't. It isn't an open source, decentralized social networking technology
Public figures and media entities don't give a flying fuck what it is or isn't. It's a matter of "can we monetize?" and "holy shit, look at that untapped audience". Things like "open source" and "decentralized" are the things only we nerds care about, and even in that group we find ourselves often in the minority.
If you want to build that social network utopia and get it to see some actual usage, you'll need to have a clear advantage and be able to get everyone and their grandma to move away from facebook, twitter and whatnot. For a media entity "decentralized social network" means "unreliable demographics" and "open source" sadly still means "not easy to monetize". Aside from that, you also need a certain momentum to build up, and have features that someone else doesn't have. Google+ is a perfect example of not being able to convince the greater public that you've got a better offer.
Personally, I can think of hundreds of more interesting hobby projects than hacking together an open source decentralized social network. But if you find it interesting, please do contribute code/documentation/fleshed out ideas to the community. Happy hacking!
Re:what it is and isn't doesn't matter to the publ (Score:5, Interesting)
I was surprised to see so many public figures and media entities jump on board — mainly because of what Ello isn't. It isn't an open source, decentralized social networking technology
Public figures and media entities don't give a flying fuck what it is or isn't. It's a matter of "can we monetize?" and "holy shit, look at that untapped audience". Things like "open source" and "decentralized" are the things only we nerds care about, and even in that group we find ourselves often in the minority.
There' s nothing wrong with open source, but making something open source doesn't automatically make it better or more desirable. If you want to create a legitimate competitor to Facebook, Google or just about any other tech company, it's going to take a serious amount of hardware and infrastructure, and that ain't free..
Since it's unlikely that you can pull a couple of billion dollars out of your ass, your only options are (a) Charge people for access. We already know how well that (won't) work. Or, (2) Advertising. Which puts you right back into the whole privacy problem. Companies like Facebook and Google don't abuse your privacy because they are evil, they do it because it's the only way to make the money that keeps them in business.
There's a reason why companies like Facebook, Google and Ebay have no significant competition .Anyone who says they are going to create a competitor to one of the popular tech companies AND striclty respect your privacy is either a liar or completely delusional with no idea how business actually works.
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If you want to create a legitimate competitor to Facebook, Google or just about any other tech company, it's going to take a serious amount of hardware and infrastructure, and that ain't free..
But it also does not have to be yours... Look at the massive amount of data bit torrent moves around by everyone gives a little of what they have. If you make a thick app that runs all the time, you have some amazing processing power and bandwidth. And a peer 2 peer, decentralized Facebook has some serious advantages.
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And put that on a mobile...
Currently, the most interesting option for me is secushare.org [secushare.org], because it is p2p. Make sure it is available on android/apple/etc. and easy to use. And the p2p-capabilities can provide your backup as well
Killer features? (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's the tricky thing about privacy and social networks: Facebook's privacy support is actually pretty good. Whilst people might tell you in the abstract that they want more privacy from Facebook, figuring out what they would change in concrete terms is very hard. For example, they might say "I don't want to see ads" - but given the choice, they don't want to pay for anything either. So this feedback ends up being pretty useless, equivalent to hearing "I want everything and a pony". It's not a basis for a product.
Google learned this one the hard way with Google+. The original way Google+ tried to differentiate itself from Facebook was with circles. The idea is, Facebooks relatively singular notion of "friend" doesn't reflect the way real people work, this means it doesn't respect people's privacy and so people use the product less .... therefore by giving them better tools, they'd win a lot of users. Facebook responded that they'd tried the same thing, it turns out people don't like making lists of friends and controlling their sharing at a fine grained level, so it wouldn't work. And guess what? Facebook were right. Sure, you interview people in focus groups and they say one thing. In reality they might do something else.
So - decentralised open source social networks. Not gonna work. People might sound enthusiastic when you pitch it to them in the abstract, but actually Facebook works fine for them, and the kind of privacy that matters to them (can people see who views their profile?! Can my parents see my drunken party pics?) is already well supported and tuned.
Ultimately what will do off Facebook, eventually, is a change in how people use social networking that for whatever reason they cannot replicate in their main product.
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I think you are wrong about this. I do think people actually want something like circles from Google+. Google+ failed for other reasons, mainly the fact that everyone is on Facebook and before they get to G+ things will be very quiet there.
You need to get past the first hurdle of getting people onto the new social media platform. Then you can improve it.
The Facebook lists have failed because it is such a pain to use. Instead people simply don't post stuff other than very banal and general
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cross compatability (Score:3)
No platform will work until you make it easy to migrate. Just like nothing could replace Lotus 123 until it could open it's file types. Write an open source social network that can post to facebook, and see facebook posts so that the users don't have to give up their friends in order to switch and you'll have something.
Unfortunately the only way I see this happening is via federal regulation, and I cringe at the thought of what other nonsense the feds would stick into such a law.
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Unfortunately the only way I see this happening is via federal regulation, and I cringe at the thought of what other nonsense the feds would stick into such a law.
It is hard to imagine something more nonsensical than the idea of such regulation. What POSSIBLE reason could there be for such regulation?
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To prevent mono-cultures and monopolies in social networks like we're seeing now. Facebook has nearly every detail of everyone in this countries lives. With subtle tweaks to their software the could easily turn elections in their favor. The federal government doesn't generally like a single company to have that kind of power.
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Facebook got their 'monopoly' by providing a service that many people like. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, and it in no way needs to be 'prevented.'
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Trusts always form by offering a deal that many people take voluntarily. That doesn't mean that it has to be allowed to use its monopoly position to keep the gains it has achieved.
Trust-breaking won the war of ideas like 100 years ago, and proved to be able to do little things like "prevent Standard Oil from running the world".
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There is absolutely no parallel between Standard Oil and Facebook. Standard Oil did not get in trouble because it was the oil everybody used, it got in trouble because it formed trusts. These trusts made deals that made it impossible for anyone to compete with them. For instance, the trust not only controlled the oil supply, but also the transportation system used to deliver the oil. They also bought competing businesses just to shut them down. THAT is was antitrust laws are for, not stupid crap like 'y
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Being unable to attract customers is not a barrier to entry. Having to build your own railroad in order to sell oil is a barrier to entry.
Your own statement shows you to be incorrect. 'Google couldn't do it'? Bullshit. Google DID it. The fact that nobody used it is not Facebooks, and certainly not the governments, problem. Google did not provide a good enough reason for people to switch, too bad for Google. Before FB there was MySpace, widely used and nobody could possibly compete with them. Then FB
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MySpace didn't have much penetration in college students. FB started there. Now FB has penetration throughtout all demos. There is no thin-edge to exploit.
The "product" FB sells its users is its other users. By definition, no other service pr
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I don't think a law will be needed, but IMO you are exactly right that cross compatibility will be key.
Personally, I'm hoping that HTML5/AJAX/etc gets to be such a big deal that all data going to/from facebook is done that way. It's then a fairly clean API others can use (even if there are legal issues with that). It could be done now with a mix of that and screen scraping, but it'd be difficult to keep up.
If, at some point, someone created a client based application (probably browser based and in javascrip
Takes Two To Network (Score:2)
So unfortunately this means there really aren't any open source alternatives.
Unfortunately the distributed model has fundamental privacy problems. One needs complete trust in all server nodes as they can do nearly anything with a user's data after they have access. e.g. a user can revoke permission but that doesn't prevent a networked server from having cached & continuing to display it. Or potentially a rogue server which makes everything they have permission to see publicly available.
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Diaspora's solution is that the "personal information" is housed on a server that you trust (ie. one you run or know personally the administrator of). Nothing marked "private" is typically passed off the home node unless you specifically push it out.
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Good designs can prevent rouge servers
That doesn't take good design, just good colour choices.
Re:Takes Two To Network (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Any user has got to be able to get involved, the barrier to entry in terms of technical knowledge should be as low as possible.
2. All data should be stored encrypted and moved around encrypted, so a person has to hack your personal machine (laptop, desktop, phone) to decrypt anything you have hosted on the network or that has been shared with you by a friend.
3. Because there is no central hosting, the network should have some kind of builtin distributed backup system.
For a while it looked like a fundamentally unsolvable problem to me, but some groups have at least an idea of an answer and are working on it. There's crypto-currency (off hand I think "maidsafe", "quark", and "ethereum", but I could be remembering wrong) that is under development that lets users farm coins based on the resources they make available to the crypto-currency network: RAM, CPU, and storage. If you contribute more of those resources to the network than you consume, you accumulate extra currency you can use to buy real things. If you contribute less, you have to buy currency to cover your operating costs. All that seems tangential to a distributed social network, but you can link the two. Host the distributed social network on the computing resources made available by that crypto-currency. Your messages and data transfers to other users are tiny micro-transactions on the crypto-currency market. Your backups are micro-transactions on the crypto-currency market, and all of the redundant backups are encrypted. The same public/private key infrastructure governing transactions can be hooked into to make sure all data is encrypted in transit. Anyone that wants to participate can install the client on a phone, laptop, or desktop and get started.
Who knows if it will ever actually work. But as crazy as it is, it seems to have a more realistic chances of mainstream success than something like Diaspora. With Diaspora you need to trust your hosting provider or else have the technical knowhow and interest to host your own, and that absolutely won't scale large enough to make a dent in the established players.
Hard problem to solve (Score:4, Interesting)
The rest of the problem is actually pretty straight forward. Most social networking sites are nothing more than an RSS Feed of a bunch of content produced by the user. Add in the ability to attach pictures and videos to the posts and you have most of what people use social networks for. Private messages are nice too. We actually have tools that do most of what we need out of a social networking site. The difficulty is putting the pieces together into a cohesive package and getting it to play nice with the other social networks so that people can slowly move over.
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Funny, I found Diaspora to be easy to install.. no more difficult than any other "web 2.0" app. It does require something a little more than a simple "webhosting" account: you need to be able to configure Apache or whatever webserver to run the Passenger bits properly, and that's not something I think you can do on a $5 shared-hosting Dreamhost account (that said, it runs fine on Dreamhost VPS: I ran it that way for a while). And Diaspora does have ways of pushing to Facebook and Twitter: any more interact
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This is essentially what I was going to post. I set up a pod on a VM, and while I finally got it working (after assistance from one of the devs via IRC), if there's going to be real acceptance of Diaspora, it needs to deploy cleanly and automatically. This is not currently the case [diasporafoundation.org].
Another point that doesn't get enough attention is the lack of symmetrical bandwidth on consumer ISP links. This will limit both the utility and acceptance of any distributed app/protocol (social networking or otherwise). It'
Nobody cares (Score:2)
" It isn't an open source, decentralized social networking technology."
I hate to break it to you, but people don't care. That's techobabble to the overwhelming majority of the audience. When it comes to social networks, people care about the following things:
1. Are the people I want to connect with using it
2. Does it look good
3. Is it easy to use
4. Privacy, sometimes
Disapora failed because it was high on technobabble and low on the other stuff.
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Getting al of that to work is difficult, but it's a worthwhile problem to solve.
Diaspora appliance (Score:2)
The "average" person is not going to setup their own Diaspora server. If Diaspora came pre-installed and setup on a Roku like device that a user simply plugged in and connected to their home network then I think it would be more viable. It has to be really really easy to setup so that Grandma can use it.
Beyond that I would like to see someone develop an ad network that allowed individual users of Diaspora to monetize their own information. Say I really don't min
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Except that I can sign up for Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr/G+/Whatever with a browser, and costs me zero dollars.
A Disapora appliance would have to cost more than zero dollars, because you're making and distributing hardware. Why would people ever buy it? What happens when it fails, or the baby spills juice on it, or it needs patching, or any number of other real world things happens to it?
It's a complete non-starter unless it also does something game changing.
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RE: Shared monitization of the ad rev, great idea. I'd like to see it work. The only example I know of is a gone now service called ZenZoo that did this.
It sort of devolved into a multi level marketing thing with people trying to get other people to sign up so their share of ad rev would go up and you had log in a certain number of times a month or something.
Anyway, would be worth look up if anyone is thinking of trying this. I'd be in on an advertising, subtle, share.
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Yeah, but a lot of that analysis is to figure out things about you, things you already know.
The problem is Facebook and Google already have sufficient amounts of information on sufficient numbers of people that your own high
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I think that we need to fundamentally change the web so that Google and Facebook share their profits with us. They are after all making profits by selling your data. Now obviously they do lots of complicated analysis which is where a lot of the value added is but the raw resource is your data. You should be compensated for it.
You are being compensated just not monetarily. You get free access to search engines and social networking sites.
OB fun-poke at ignorant bufoons (Score:2)
Oh, so they've got one, then.
OpenAutonomy and the big list of alternatives (Score:2)
(Sorry for the shameless plug)
Personally, I created OpenAutonomy [openautonomy.com] to solve this (and other) problems in an open, federated network (here is a video I did at FSOSS 2014 talking about this space [youtube.com]). There is no centre of the network, nor is there much of a limitation in terms of what it can actually do.
That said, most of the approaches to solving this problem focus on social networking, specifically, and there are tons of them [wikipedia.org]!
The problem is figuring out a way to explain the vision to a non-technical audience a
Charity based not for profit facebook? (Score:2)
Friendica and redmatrix (Score:2)
I have been happily using Friendica [friendica.com] for a family network for a while. While quirky, it works, and has a bunch of stuff for interoperating with other sites including facebook and even using RSS feeds. In terms of privacy, development has moved on to redmatrix [redmatrix.me]. The problem being that going to a truly privacy-oriented framework means interoperability is out.
But really it seems like the protocol and the software need to be separated so that different social networking software can interoperate. There is a
How about GNU Network/GNU Social? (Score:2)
Diaspora is still very much alive (Score:2)
Remember Diaspora? In 2010, it raised $200,641 on Kickstarter to take on Facebook with "an open source personal web server to share all your stuff online." Two years later, they essentially gave up, leaving their code to the open source community to carry forward.
Diaspora is still very much alive [podupti.me].
Erm, Post-Facebook (Score:2)
An alternative to "Post-Facebook" is to not use an all-encompassing social media tool/website instead of replacing it with a clone that offers better privacy.